Better Citizens than Netizens

Citizens of the Spark feels like it was custom-made with me in mind. It’s a tableau-builder (yes) designed by Philip duBarry and illustrated by Diego Sá (yes) seeded with a small selection from a huge pool of cards (yeeesss) that happens to be populated with anthropomorphic animals (eh, fine). Those animals, it turns out, are not your usual medieval-ish fare, but scientists, scholars, performers, and everything else, jumbled together to form a polis of intersecting interests and vocations. Which is to say, it brought me around in the end. Ah, my pleasant animal polis. It begins with a shuffle. Such a big shuffle, in fact, that my relatively broad hands ache at the strain of holding so many cards. There are thirty flavors of citizen in the box, a generous spread. Depending on your player count, you’ll take seven to ten of those sets, each set ten cards in size, and riffle them together until your knuckles crack. And then you try to get them to work together. Even in its earliest…