I am a simple man with simple needs, just look at my profile if you don’t believe me, so if I see a history themed game, or one with anthropomorphic animals, I buy it no questions asked. That is the honest truth of why and how I bought Citizens of the Spark. Well, that and my dad saying “I wanted to buy you one of those games you play all the time but I didn’t know what to get. Here is 50 euros, enjoy “, God bless him and God bless the consumerism spirit linked to Christmas.
Citizens of the Spark is a strategy game of card drafting, engine building, and combo crafting where each player strives to achieve the most powerful city by gathering the most sparks (or VP) from their combos and characters abilities. This is the second card game Thunderworks Game put out in 2025 and, to be honest, I believe this time around they knocked it out of the park. They managed to take some of the good elements from FlipToons and improved on some of their weaker points (such as card versatility).
Game setup and flow
For a card game this has a lot, and I really mean a lot, of setup. Firstly, based on the number of players you need to randomly pick the characters that will make up the deck (or use one of the recommended variants at the back of the rule book). You will select 7 characters in a 2-player game, 8 characters in a 3-player game and up to 10 characters in a 5-player game. In each case, make sure you don’t use more than 4 characters whose character name is underlined. Create the deck based on the randomly selected characters by adding all the cards of the particular character in the deck. Enjoy your shuffling, we'll talk tomorrow, okay? The next day, once you're done setting up the deck, give each player 4 cards, out of which they will keep only 2. Also, based on the number of players you might need to discard some of the cards added in the deck. Create a draft table with cards per group, these will again depend on the player count. Decide who is the first player and you are good to go.
The turn flow is pretty simple, you pick a set of cards out of the available ones, collect all the sparks available for that particular pair of characters (if any). Optionally you can activate one of the characters in your tableau. Here is where the simplicity and the agency of the game kicks in.
Each type of character has an ability which, once used, means discarding the character from your tableau while getting a positive effect for you. However, waiting and stacking more of the same characters before using the character will generate a more powerful effect upon its activation. So, you see how this opens up an interesting decision point for the active player? “Do I get a simple effect or hope I will draft more of this particular character and build up for a bigger turn?” – this is the question one might ask themselves. Still Citizens of the Spark manages to up the anti by adding another dimension to the activation decision. After you are done activating a particular character, everyone, in turn order, can activate that character if they have them in their tableau. So, you can end up with a situation such as, me activating my soldier characters, that allows me to steal cards from someone’s tableau, just so that my wife could in turn activate her soldiers to steal my scientists which then allowed her to get a powerful turn and win on the back of those.
The Good
I am a huge fan of tableau builders, Ark Nova is my favorite game after all, but I am reluctant to play tableau builders at a high player count. This is mainly because, and let’s be honest about it, most tableau builders are a min max experience where people play a multiplier solitaire game. Let me explain what I mean. In almost all these types of games there is a mechanism to acquire cards and then play them to trigger some effects and get some victory points. Most of the interaction in this case boils down to “will that person draft the card I am hoping to get or not”. I am happy to say Citizens of the Spark stands out in this respect. There is little to no down time, you constantly need to look over to the other players tableaus and see what they can activate of the back of your activation.
I mentioned Fliptoons earlier, and how Citizens of the Spark does mostly the same theme but better. Although both games have 30 unique characters, the decision of randomly mixing 7 to 10 types of characters in the deck makes for a more engaging and highly replayable game. By deciding not to cram all 30 of the characters into one deck the game actually adds replayability rather than taking it away, and I for one salute this decision.
I don’t know if I am becoming a boomer or not but, 2025 marked the year where I searched for streamline designs and I actively stayed away from games with “over 9000” mechanisms. This is one of the reasons why Castle Combo was the game of the year for me; streamlined, elegant, no extra fluff, just pick a card, play a card, and trigger a card. Citizens of the Spark replicates this beautifully. No extra components, no convoluted mechanics. Just pick a card and trigger a card. This elegance and simplicity translates into less rules explanation downtime (I can explain the game in under 5 minutes). Literally the game takes more time to setup than to explain.
The Bad
Which, dear readers, segways me nicely into the not so good parts of the game. The setup takes too much time for what the game offers. Don’t get me wrong, I will play Mosaic which is a beast to get to the table, but at least I get some game for my setup time. Citizens of the Spark takes way too long to setup for the gameplay it offers.
The second item on my “don’ts” list is the Outcast. No, not the band, rather the character in the game. You see, there is a character in the game that nobody wants in their tableau and that is the aforementioned Outcast, a character who’s only feature is that it gives negative points to their owner based on the number of characters in the existing tableau. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem if the number of characters that allow you to get rid of other characters would be greater than 9. Yes, you read that right, 30 characters and only 9 of them can help you remove troublesome characters from your tableau.
That means that if you are extracting random characters and playing at a low player count such as 2 to 3 players, there is a high likelihood of drawing a suit of characters that will not permit you to get rid of the Outcast. Hence this super combo-ish, strategic game devolves into who draws fewer Outcasts then the other. Can you feal the player agency? Me neither. There is a work-around to this issue, you can either play with a suggested suit, mentioned on the back of the of the rule book, or house rule it and agree that if the Outcast is present, you should always have a counter to it.
Conclusion
Now that I have gushed over the game, I best be getting on and explain who this game is for and I will be brief: everybody. If you enjoy drafting and card combos, this game is for you. If you enjoy interactive games, this game will be right up your alley. If you enjoy fast paced games with minimal rules, again, this game is for you. Okay okay, I don’t want to oversell it… if you're looking for a heavy, crunchy game, a brain burner if you will, this might not be the game for you.
