Barcelona Review

Barcelona is a game I was excited to play. A city builder euro game that revolves around one of the most unique cities in Europe is right in my wheelhouse. Players are tasked with building up a section of the city by following Cerdà's urbanism concepts. Each round, players will place their two citizen tokens on top of each other on an intersection of the city and carry out the actions that are perpendicular to the tokens. These can involve building city streets or intersections and carrying out bonuses, adding tiles to the cobblestone board for resources and bonuses, upgrading your personal board, or moving along various tracks. If the tokens you placed fit the requirements of any of the buildings, you must build them. Then place the top tokens into the track at the bottom of the board. Once the bottom track meets a certain amount of tokens, a scoring phase will happen where depending on the randomized objectives and your standing on the Cerdà track you will score points. There are three of these in the game and then it ends. The player with the highest score will be the winner.

The Good: Barcelona is a gorgeous euro game that manages to feel completely new but familiar at the same time. There's so many decision points to be made in every turn and watching the city come alive with buildings and streets is beautifully done. The game is extremely approachable despite how many different things are going on at one time. Turns move quickly and points come in a hurry. Being able to gain and upgrade your end game goals means you'll have some direction but there can be a lot of trial and error to be done. The historical notes in the rulebook are a great addition. They provide context to a lot of the different mechanics.

The Okay: The setup time can be a bit cumbersome. Since the game doesn't have any sort of insert you have the joy of baggies of stuff. I hope that one of the insert companies out there comes up with something to streamline the overall setup time. While not always a huge deal, having all of your player pieces stacked on your player board can be annoying. Any bump can shift things around on you.

The Not So Good: While approachable, the teach of this game is weird. Because there are so many different ways to score points you'll have to take a fair bit of time to go over all of them. There's some concepts that I didn't love such as the trams and passengers mechanics. Being able to gain bonus actions is great but the addition of passengers and potentially giving points to other players became a bit much to keep track of.

Final Thoughts: While I've never been to Barcelona, and this may be the closest I ever get to it. It's a city that has always captured my attention. The fact that a game was made based purely on the city's layout is part of what made me fall in love with board games. There is literally a game for everything. The fact that it's a great game is just the icing on the cake. I feel like I've been in a bit of a Euro slump lately and Barcelona was exactly what I needed to get out of it.

Thanks to Board & Dice for providing a review copy.