Barcelona
- Paul Devlin
- Sep 18, 2023
- 12 min read
Updated: May 11, 2024
A love letter to the eponymous Catalonian city. Don’t be fooled however by its colourful, ornate beauty – Barcelona is a game full of utterly agonising choices, huge turns and points EVERYWHERE.
Barcelona
Designer: Dani Garcia
Publisher: Board&Dice
2023
How to play:
Players take on the role of Assistant to the renowned urban planner Cerdà and are tasked with modernising and building in Barcelona. Practically speaking, turns will start with players taking two ‘citizen’ worker tiles from a draw bag. There will be three types of citizens available; working, middle and upper class citizens represented by green, pink and blue tiles. Stack your two citizen tiles in whichever order you choose and place that stack onto the main board at the intersection of one of a number of rows and columns. You will then take the corresponding action of both the row and of the column that your citizens have been placed in and if you are lucky, the action from the rarer diagonal row.
Your two or three actions per turn which will generally involve:
• Gaining resources (gold and cloth).
• Removing items from your player board such as small and large street tiles and intersection tiles – claiming bonuses and VP when they are placed onto the main board as well bonuses and points for clearing certain spaces on your player board.
• Obtaining ‘modernisme’ tiles – strategic objectives to try and fulfil.
• Placing ornate concrete tiles onto a separate shared board - just be sure to keep your placement orthogonally adjacent and claim yourself the corresponding bonus.
• Moving a tram around your streets to try and claim additional actions
…and more.
Once you have placed your Citizens and taken the related actions then the final part of your turn sees you having to “build if you are able to build”. You see, as you place your citizens out onto the main board they start surrounding squares. Have a certain number surrounding a square and that square is then eligible to built on. What kind of building you can build (or even overbuild) depends on the types of citizens that are surrounding each square and what colours are visible (making that earlier choice of how to stack your citizens when you place them an additional puzzle to contemplate!) You can choose buildings that are in-keeping with Cerdà’s vision of how he wants Barcelona to be built and they will see you rewarded with moves up a Cerdà track (more on that in a second). Other buildings however are not in keeping with his vision and you therefore need to move down the Cerdà track (though there may be other bonuses to compensate).
Place your chosen building onto the main board, move up and down the Cerdà track as a result and claim any other bonuses that might arise. Finally, remove from the main board the citizens that you just used to build, placing them onto the lower section / citizens track of the main board in a row running from left to right that matches their specific colour. Made up of three distinct sections (each with their own randomised and variable strategic scoring objective), when any row in the first section fills with citizens then players will score how well they have performed in relation to that section’s strategic objective multiplied by how far they currently sit on the Cerdà track that I mentioned earlier. For example, that current strategic objective might reward me with two points for each small road I have placed out onto the main board thus far. Great, I built 3 so far so that is 6 points for those small roads - multiplied x4 because of my position on the Cerda track! An even better 24 points!!
The game then continues as normal as the rows of citizens on the lower half of the board continue to fill as you do more and more building - triggering two more of those scoring phases at which point it’s the end of the game. In addition to points gained during the game (and wow are there are lot of points going on here – but more on that later) as well as the points you accrued during those three strategic objectives scoring phases, you will also add up any additional ‘modernisme’ objective tiles that you gained and were working towards fulfilling as well as points for clearing your player board of certain items. Points, points, points, points, points. You’re probably going to need a calculator to hand!
A reasonably straightforward game with the usual Euro nuance behind each of its actions. The complexity in Barcelona however comes from the volume of options each turn, trying to find the synergies between your actions as well as the juggling that is needed in placing workers, building in optimal places and still managing to keep yourself on the right end of that Cerdà track. I’d place Barcelona just above medium weight for these reasons despite the simplicity of its turn structure.
Solo Headlines:
A broadly positive solo experience with a couple of minor grumbles...
You’ll be playing against a point scoring opponent - ‘Gaudi’ - complete with its own player board and a small deck of cards that will help it take its turns. Much like during your own turns, Gaudi will draw two citizen tiles at random from the draw bag, stack them in a specific (but consistent) order, follow some simple logic to decide where on the board to place the citizen tiles, flip one of its cards to take the displayed action and finally follow more simple logic to decide what and where to build on the main board.
There isn’t a massive amount of differences between how Gaudi plays and how you play and while your first game may take a little longer as you ponder its placement logic, it does click quite quickly and starts becoming ‘at a glance’ stuff. Barcelona is a game where individual turns can have quite a lot going on so while Gaudi isn’t particularly onerous to manage, by virtue of the game’s design its turns will take a little longer than ‘flip a card, quickly move something, score some arbitrary points’ but again, after your first game you’ll get into a good, swift flow and feel that Gaudi is simple enough to operate.
Gaudi does a good job of making the board feel alive, making buildings sprout up, taking some coveted spaces that you might have had your eyes on, forcing plenty of pivots and revealing opportunities. Does it always make the smartest of moves? Probably not – but neither do I.
The solo mode has varying levels of difficulty and some further suggestions in the rulebook on how to tweak the difficulty even further. Which brings me on to a couple of slight negatives…
I will most likely talk about this more later in the review but Barcelona is a game where there are huge amounts of points of offer everywhere. It wouldn’t be unusual for a single turn to see you scoring 20, 30 maybe even 40+ points. This means that in a game where one player has just one or two more optimal turns compared to their opponent then at the end of the game they are going to have won by a significant margin – no tight finishes where only a point or two separates players. Instead a gulf opens up. Given that Gaudi doesn’t always take the most optimal turns this results more often than not (in my experience) in the human player running away with the game. Of course there is then the option to tweak the difficulty of Gaudi to make things more difficult but with that came my second minor issue; it felt really hard to tweak the difficulty to match how my own ability was increasing game to game – I was either not tweaking enough and finding myself running away with the game still or tweaking too much and finding myself demoralised by a punishing loss. No tight wins or losses - more a case of 100+ points between the winner or the loser. The fact that so many points are on offer here means that end scoring can feel massively swingy and I felt like I was having to work to find its optimum difficulty for my current level of ability rather than just being able to enjoy the game itself.
That said, those gripes about scoring didn’t diminish my enjoyment of the solo game – but I think that has something to do with the fact that I’m not adverse to Beat Your Own Score solo modes and as much as Gaudi provides an opponent to try to beat, I found that Barcelona at its core was making me want to try more to smash some VP milestones – can I get 250 VP? 300? 400??? I started to treat Gaudi less as the opponent to beat and more as a mechanism to just ‘keep me on my toes’ as I worked my way through a solo optimisation puzzle trying to get the highest possible score. With that mindset Barcelona became a really enjoyable solo game and one that I kept coming back (and back) to especially given the fact it plays in my 60 minute sweet spot (give or take a good few periods of hefty analysis paralysis).
General Headlines:
First off, credit to designer Dani Garcia for doing his utmost to take a game that at its heart is quite an abstract ‘place some workers on the board and take the action of the row and the column that you have placed them in’ and make it as thematic as possible. Lots of historical references litter the rule book and lots of thematic explanations about almost all of the gameplay elements (Newton: take note!) . Barcelona is still a very abstract game (enjoyably so) but I do appreciate the opportunity to read and learn a little more about the history of a real life setting as I play. Nice.
I mentioned earlier that there are points everywhere in Barcelona – and boy, I mean everywhere for almost everything. Clear something off your player board = points. Place a tile on the main board = points. Move up a track = points. Place a worker on a specific spot = points. Build = points. Three scoring phases = points. End game scoring = points. I genuinely could go on (and on). The term ‘point salad’ gets thrown about quite often but it couldn’t apply more to Barcelona. In any Euro it’s going to take a game or so to really see the ebb and flow of how to play well but for Barcelona it took me a little longer. My first couple of games felt unfocussed and incoherent which wasn’t helped by the fact that I was scoring for pretty much everything that I was doing, whether or not I was playing the game well. Usually as I play a game I can use the fact that I am not scoring as an indication that I am not doing well and therefore need to alter my approach. Here though I could have no idea of what I was doing or why I was doing it and still collect a good chunks of points. I had a good few moments early on along the lines of “is this it? Should I be doing other things or just gathering up these points as I go?” The answer was yes, I should be doing other things…
…the ‘click’ happens, the fog lifts and things eventually become a lot clearer. Certainly enjoy the buzz of the many points that you are gaining throughout the game - do your best to maximise them for sure, but just enjoy each move up the VP track. More importantly though Barcelona begs of you to make sure that you are also keeping a sharp focus on a) those three main strategic scoring objectives as well as any other ‘modernisme’ objectives that you may pick up as you go b) trying to get the highest ‘multipliers’ possible. Getting to the end of one of the three scoring phases of the game having done your best to meet the objective is all well and good – but have you been able to climb the Cerdà track too because the further up you go, the more you can multiply your scoring by 1x, 2x, 3x or even 4x which is going to be the difference between you doing well or not. Staying high up that Cerda track is easier said than done as a lot of the actions you can take in the game force you down the track (e.g. placing buildings that Cerdà doesn’t like – they may get you other benefits but down the Cerda track you plummet for your sins). That blend of immediate points vs points gained from achieving strategic objectives vs trying to keep high up on the Cerda track to achieve multipliers is excellent. You’ll quickly move from simply ‘getting points everywhere’ to instead watching scores explode.
Individual turns are really enjoyable too – I say ‘really enjoyable’ but what I mean by that is ‘utterly agonising’ and I can see Barcelona suffering particularly at 3 and 4 player counts from a lot of down time. I’ve played at 2 player and the increased downtime was somewhat noticeable periodically even then. Playing solo however I am able to leisurely fall down more than a few delicious analysis paralysis holes without the pressure of knowing that another player might be cursing the day I was born if I take another few minutes before making a move. If ‘agonising choices from a large menu of options’ is something that you enjoy then welcome to your new favourite game:
• Draw two workers at random = which order should I stack them in???
• Where to place those workers on the board = choose from 10+ spaces at any one time!
• Place your workers in a row that is perfect for you = realise that the column maybe isn’t the best.
• Settled on a space where you think the action in the row and the column is perfect = realising that your placement might not allow you to build and you really, REALLY want to build.
• Choosing a building = does that building move you up and down the right tracks…
• …and does all of that help you in any way towards your strategic objectives.
So much to decide before even placing your workers on the board. Turns are brimming full of actions, things to do and points to earn. It all feels satisfying and enjoyable.
Variability is great too. The strategic objectives that you chase game to game are randomly assigned from a big stack of tiles and they significantly change how you approach each game - no opportunity to just rely on tried and tested methods and pathways each game. Equally, the actions that can be taken in each row and column of the game can also be randomly assigned which similarly means that synergies that were present in your previous games may no longer be there next time, while new tasty synergies will undoubtedly emerge.
Some fun to be had too with the ‘mini games’ that are going on throughout – perhaps you are going to use a tram to roam the streets of Barcelona, maybe you are going to lay tiles on a separate shared board for bonuses, maybe you are going to try to lay down lots of optional streets on the main board... Your strategic objectives might dictate which of these mini games you are concentrating on but each of them feels distinct and fun.
I do also enjoy a game that makes me concentrate not just on what to do but when to do it – timings, timings, timings. Barcelona lets me play with this nicely. When I build anything I return the Citizens that I have used down to the lower half of the board and when a particular section fills it triggers a scoring phase:
The ‘green’ section looking is full but I still need to keep playing? I better use some blue workers instead? Deciding which order to stack my two workers? Well I really want the pink section to fill quickly so that the scoring phase kicks in as I am as ready for it as I will ever be - Ok then let’s make sure my pink worker is on top of the stack and placed somewhere where I am guaranteed to use it this turn and trigger the end of the round.
…that blend of what to do and when to do it is great and makes for a nice bit of ‘push and pull’.
For any solo players reading this that are also planning on playing this multiplayer, some of the points I raised about the disparities in scoring in the solo section of this review also hold true in the multiplayer game. When introducing Barcelona to new players it’s going to be inevitable that a more experienced player is going to play better than someone who is brand new to it – but it’s going to be really easy for the new players to feel blown completely out of the water and demoralised and demotivated by what will likely be 100+ points difference between you and them. It’s probably worth explaining to them from the off that Barcelona isn’t going to be a tightly fought contest – someone is going to win and it’s going to be very clear on who the winner was and that they shouldn’t feel too deflated by the potential huge difference in scores.
But hey, this is a solo review not a multiplayer one so for now all I shall say is that while it may sound like I had a couple of issues with Barcelona, none of them have been enough to put me off the game – indeed I enjoyed it so much that I subsequently picked up a complete set of its promo tiles from the publisher and look forward to trying them out. This one is a keeper.
At a glance:
A strong effort from publisher Board & Dice and designer Dani Garcia. A particularly good solo game, if only for the fact that its wealth of choices and options makes for heavy bouts of (delicious) analysis paralysis that you can indulge in at your leisure.
+ A nice blend of strategic goals and reactive, tactical game play
+ A rather abstract game but good effort has been made to give some historical insights and thematic relevance
+ Reasonably easy solo mode which brings the main board to life and offers plenty of tactical pivots
+ Plenty of variability and different strategies to chase – each game feels fresh and different.
+ Every turn feels huge and satisfying.
+ / - Very easy to be locked into bouts of analysis paralysis which might be joy for some or quite the opposite for others.
- Difficulty levels of the solo opponent can feel difficult to get right for your level of ability
- So many points on offer in every turn that it’s easy to run away significantly with the game.
Final Score:
8 out of 10 (Reviewed after 12 plays)
Comments