by W. Eric Martin

▪️ Are you ready to re-enter the world of Johannes Sich's MicroMacro with 100% less murder and genitals? If so, then take a gander at MicroMacro: Kids – Crazy City Park, which debuted from publisher Edition Spielwiese in June 2025.

Here's an overview of this 1-4 player co-operative game that's aimed at those aged 6 and up:

Yes, exactly like real detectives: By scanning a piece of paper repeatedly. No, really, that's what a lot of detective work is like.

The missions come in a spiral notebook so that no one has to worry about keeping stacks of cards organized:


▪️ Snake Charmers is a bluffing, deduction, and memory game for 3-6 players from the Brand family — Inka, Markus, Emely, and Lukas — that will debut at SPIEL Essen 25.

I tried this game once in the Hachette booth at Gen Con 2025 — as Hachette distributes Edition Spielwiese titles in the U.S. — and it took most of the game to wrap our heads around what we're trying to do, especially since no one had great experience with hidden role games, so treat your first game as a learning experience.

You start the game with 5-9 night cards in play based on the player count, with each card numbered individually from 1 to 5/6/8/9. During play, a night card might be flipped to day; if a day card would be flipped, it's removed from play instead. If you have a snake in your hand, you need to have only a single night card in play to win; if not, you want zero night cards in play. That's it — a binary condition that will end the game with victory for one side or the other.

To set up, shuffle cards numbered 0 to 5/6/8/9, along with 1-3 snakes (again, depending on player count), then deal one person three cards and everyone else two cards. Additionally each person holds an open door card in hand.

Whoever has three cards chooses a player with an open door, which they then place on the table to close, then offers them a card face down, stating that it's a particular number or a snake. The door player can accept the card or refuse it; in the latter case, the giver offers a second card face down; if the door player refuses that card, they must take the giver's third card. After receiving a card, if the card features a number matching a card on the table — not what was claimed! — they flip that card from night to day or remove it from play; if it features a snake or a number not present on the table, they say, "Nothing happens".

The player who now has three cards chooses someone with an open door, etc., until all doors are closed, at which point all doors open again, then play continues.

You might have noticed that you can pass a snake, which means that your role in the game is fluid. Start with no snake, and you want night gone; get passed a snake, and you want one night to remain; pass the snake away, and you're once again a fan of daylight. Thus, you want to track which cards are where and who's on your side as the night/day cards start disappearing. Maybe you'll see an opportunity to switch sides at the last moment to win — or maybe to pass a second snake in hand to someone else to bring them onto your side.

▪️ Another 3-6 player release from Edition Spielwiese is Oh No, We Crashed!, from newcomers Gilli Levy and Kundra Magnus.

This August 2025 release is for 3-6 players aged 6 and up with a playing time of 1-5 minutes! Yes, that's all — which is possibly less time to play than to read this exposition:

Mock-up of the components
▪️ In Q2 2025, Edition Spielwiese released a German-language edition of Bryan Burgoyne's game Seaside under the name Strandgut, which is not German for "seaside" but instead means "flotsam and jetsam" or "wreckage" — in any case, stuff you'd find on the beach, which is appropriate for this game of picking up stuff you'd find on the beach.

For background on the game, you can read Burgoyne's Seaside designer diary from June 2024.