Citizens of the Spark

• Designer: Philip duBarry
• Publisher: Thunderworks
• Players: 1-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 45-60 minutes
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/41ifd4Z
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

The fate of creatures touched by the spark of intelligence hangs in the balance. You must recruit strong animal allies to your city and unlock the potential of your citizens if your settlement is to survive the days to come.

Citizens of the Spark is a variable set-up card game in which players take turns attracting citizens, taking actions, and claiming sparks. The more citizen cards a player has of a specific type, the more powerful that citizen’s action becomes. The player with the most sparks in their city when the deck runs out wins!

Play with 7-10 animal citizen types per game, chosen from 30 available creatures and combined into one shared deck. Every citizen type has distinct powers, making each game’s action combos uniquely variable.

On your turn, recruit multiple citizens by selecting an available group of cards, placing them in your city tableau, and grouping like citizens together to grow their action strength. Next, select one type of citizen in your tableau to activate, taking the effect of the card and discarding it from your city. But keep watch on rival cities, because when you activate a citizen, all players can follow your move and activate a matching citizen of their own!

To set up the game, choose a number of Citizen card types based on player count.  The back of the rulebook has suggested sets, or you can use the Randomizer cards to let fate decide for you.  Take all ten cards of each chosen type and shuffle them together into a single deck. Each player is dealt 4 cards, and players secretly and simultaneously choose two to keep to start their city.  The assembly, or card display, is made of face up cards from the deck – always three rows of cards, but the number of cards in each row is dependent on player count.

The game is played in turn until the citizen deck is exhausted.  In each turn, the active player goes through three phases.

1] Attract Citizens – choose one of the three rows of citizen cards and add it to your city in whatever order you like.  If there are spark tokens next to your chosen row, collect those as well.  If a citizen card has a yellow “When Placed” ability, resolve it as you place the card in your city.  As you add cards to your city, stack them by type so that it is easy to see how many cards you have of each type.

2] Perform an Action – Optionally, the active player may activate a citizen stack from their city (that has an Action or an attack), placing the top card of that stack above their city so that you can see how many cards are in that stack.  The strength of the action is determined by the number of cards in that stack (including the card placed on top of the city).  After the action is resolved, all players in clockwise order can also optionally trigger the same action by placing the top card of their matching citizen stack on top of their city.

3] Clean Up – all activated Citizen cards are discarded.  The two unchosen rows of Citizens get a spark token placed next to them and the empty slot is refilled with new Citizens. The next player now repeats the process.

The game continues until the Citizen deck runs out.  Finish the current round so that all players get the same number of turns.  If you need, shuffle the discard pile to form a new deck to complete this final round.

Tally up your scores:

• Sparks collected during the game
• One Spark per card in your City at the end of the game
• Any endgame bonuses on your Citizen cards

The player with the most sparks wins.  Ties broken in favor of the player with the most Citizen cards in their city.

My thoughts on the game

So, I’ll come right out and say that Philip duBarry is someone who I feel is under-rated as a designer.  I’ve been really impressed with a number of his designs – most notably Snowcrest last year.  Citizens of the Spark feels a little familiar to Snowcrest as you are again working on building a tableau of cards.

I have definitely grown to love the whole genre of tableau builders – it is one of my current favorites.  duBarry has further captured my interest here by having a Dominion style setup… you have a whole box full of different Citizen cards, but you only choose ten of them for each game.  Thus, like Dominion, each game plays out differently based on the way that the different card types interact with each other.

However, the game differentiates itself in the way that you are forced to acquire cards in groups.  You can’t simply pick and choose the cards that you want; you have to take them in groups of 3 or 4 – all based on the random order they come out of the Citizen deck.   This part of the game is super-tactical as well as certainly luck-dependent.  Sometimes, the cards just work out in your favor; but other times, you have to figure out how to make the best of the options in front of you.  Each time a row goes unchosen, it gets another spark bonus placed on it, and at some point, even the worst line becomes appealing due to the large number of Sparks on it.

As you are collecting the cards, you are also trying to take advantage of the different actions that each type offers.  Importantly, the strength of the action is dependent on the number of cards that you have of the type, so you may not want to activate a card as soon as you get it.  Additionally, you may want to keep an eye out for what cards are being collected by your opponents, as they will be able to trigger the same type of action that you choose to do.

Of course, you’ll also get to take advantage of sneaking in extra actions when your opponents choose cards that you own on their turns – this is usually an interesting decision as you may not have quite enough of that type of card, but the lesser action may be worth taking as you essentially get this action without having to spend your turn on it, and thus you’ll be able to do something different on your own turn.

Though the Citizen deck looks huge at the start of the game, when you realize that each player turn burns 3 cards off the deck – you’ll see the end of the deck (and trigger the end of the game) pretty quickly. I like to do the math at the start of each game, as it will change based on player count, so that everyone knows about how many turns they’re going to get in the game.  There is a bit of weird player order binding in the game, though I think it evens out… The earlier players get first grab at all the cards at the start of the game, but then the later players are more likely to get a re-shuffled deck for their final draw – thus giving them a shot at cards that were otherwise no longer available.

Games of Citizens of the Spark play out quickly, I’d say 45 minutes on average.  As I mentioned earlier, I do love the game-to-game variability that arises from the different Citizen cards that are included in the set.  You can use either some of the pre-determined sets from the rulebook or you can use the randomizer cards to choose your set in any way you like (random deal, letting each player choose some, etc).     I’m finding that this is a game that I want to play again and again.

Thoughts from other Opinionated Gamers

Alison Brennan: Make up a deck of 10 card sets, each card set having an effect that gets points, cards, affects other players etc. The more you have of a card, the more powerful it is. A turn is to take a set of 3 cards from the display, add them to your tableau, and then spend one of your cards to trigger an effect. Everyone else with the same card has the option to also trigger. It’s quick enough and fun enough, identifying the sets you want to specialise in, doing the best with what’s available to pick up (ie not what your RH neighbours are collecting). The replay comes by constructing the deck using diff combinations of card sets, ranging from low interaction (which we enjoyed) to high interaction (which we didn’t) so we’ll rate somewhere in the middle.

Steph H: Ultimately, I enjoy the game fine when playing without the really bad attacking cards. Some really broken combos can happen, which makes me enjoy the game significantly less.

Jonathan: CotS highlighted the role a developer can play in making the game look its best.  I like the ideas in Citizens, but the starting packet of cards did not mesh in a way that left others at the table wanting more. There is a reason the Dominion base game had lower interaction than Dominion: Intrigue. Ultimately, it deserves more play, but might not get it due to the truism that ‘you never have a second chance to make a first impression.’

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it. Alison, Jonathan (but not the starting setup)
• Neutral. Steph
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/41ifd4Z