More about Barcelona

When a new Board&Dice game comes out you can expect a solid euro experience.
Barcelona is no exception! It’s the first game from designer Dani Garcia, but it’s a nice debut! 👍

There's a lot to like, but the focal point is definitely the action selection. 🕵️ It's basically worker-placement, but you place these neutral citizen tokens that will be removed from the map as city blocks are built later. Until that happens, they block their spaces.
As there are 5 horizontal and 5 vertical streets, that means you have 25 “worker” placement spots, each with a different action combination! 🙀 Though you can't place on occupied spots, that’s still a lot of possibilities to comb through. As you need citizen tokens in the right places to construct a building (and earn juicy points), your decision of which action spot to take is that much more layered! 🙂

Of course this does open the door to analysis paralysis, and while super combos are fun to do, they are not necessarily fun to sit through. 😅

A vital thing is how the actions can be randomized on the board, so subsequent games can feel different. You might have other action combinations and “hot spots” where people tend to go.

The actions are interesting too. Many things cost coins or cloth, and it seems like you are always short on those, no matter how much you gather. Your storage is also limited, and sometimes you have to pass on big payouts because of it. There are some fun connections between actions, meaning you can do stuff in more than one way - e.g. you can not only build streets by choosing that action, but also by either placing your pavement tile on a spot that rewards that action, or by building the appropriate public building.

There is a bunch of player interaction as the city fills up with streets and intersections from different players. Some things you want can also get taken.

You can get tons of points if you do things right. Many things give you points, but a huge part can be the objectives, especially as the multipliers for these can be raised during the game.

💬 All in all, a euro with satisfying combos, some AP, and a lot of fun interactions between players.