03/09/2026
Citizens of the Spark from Thunderworks Games
🤘🏼🤘🏼🤘🏼/5
🔞 Age 14+
👥️ 1-5 players
⏰️ 45-60 minutes
What we liked
💎 The artwork is stunning.
💎 The list of advised card group set ups depending on what kind of game you wanted, and for how many players.
What we didn't like
🪨 The game play didn't feel very exciting at 2 players, perhaps it would have been better at a higher player count with more interaction.
🪨 The switch from glittery cubes to drab cardboard for higher sparks points.
Over the course of the game players take on the role of city leaders and will be recruiting powerful anthropomorphic allies to help earn them "sparks" and claim the mantle of the greatest city.
This is an open drafting and set collection game with an impressive amount of variability due to the the large number of different, beautifully illustrated citizen cards available to select from during set up.
There are 30 types of citizens to choose from, however, during any game you will only be using between 7-10 of these sets.
The rule book hosts a number of recommended citizen set-ups for various play styles, or you can draft your own. This ensures plenty of replayability for fans of the game.
Turns are quick, take a set of 3 cards from the central Assembly, add them to your city, then do an action from one of your citizens if you wish. The longer you hold off on performing an action and the more cards of a citizen type you have in your city, the more powerful the actions will be, but this is balanced by having to discard one of the cards in that stack after the action is complete.
Unfortunately, we found that the game wasn't very exciting at 2 players as there wasn't a lot of room for strategising, and due to the ability for your opponent to follow (copy) your action if they have a matching citizen in their city, a lot of our games felt a bit tit-for-tat. We definitely suspect this game will play much better at the higher player counts.
Our only other gripe was that the 10 and 20 points were cardboard, not like the lovely glittery 1 and 2 points cubes.
Game provided via the UKBG Review Circle, all views and images are our own.
A beautifully illustrated game with a
