Beautiful eurogame set in Barcelona

I like city building games. Every time you start with a blank slate, and create something as you play. 😊 Barcelona is no exception, it’s lovely how the octagonal blocks, intersections and streets fill up the map. The gameplay is quite unique, so let’s dive into it! 🕵🏻

You start your turn with 2 citizen tiles. As the first step you have to place both on an empty intersection. The placement is important for 2 reasons. ☝️Firstly, you can take the actions corresponding to the vertical and horizontal streets you chose, and possibly a 3rd action if you placed on the diagonal street. Secondly, citizens influence where buildings can be built later.

There are many different actions: 🧐 you can gather the two resources of the game, coins and cloth; build intersections, or narrow and wide streets; move your tram 🚋 and place passengers to trigger bonus actions; build public buildings 🏨 for special actions; take scoring tiles or upgrade multipliers for these; place down pavement tiles to the side board for bonuses while upgrading your storage capacity. There are many nuances! Some will feel familiar, like getting things you cover up, or gaining things as stacks from your player board are emptied. 👍
What actions you choose will have much to do with the 3 interim scoring tiles, and other scoring tiles you draft for yourself.

The next part of your turn is constructing a building. 🏗️ Blocks have to be surrounded by certain citizen types so you can build on them. Upon construction, you move the used citizens to their track - if this is filled, then interim scorings are triggered. Scoring is interesting too, as you can move on the Cérda track with certain effects, raising or lowering your scoring multiplier. If the citizen track is completely filled, then the game is over! 🏆

At the end of your turn you draw 2 new citizen tiles from the bag, and can start planning your next turn. And that is not an easy endeavor! 🙂 You want an ideal combination of actions, but also the possibility to construct a building, as it's a huge source of points.
In summary, Barcelona is very thinky and interactive, and we’ll cover it in more detail later!