Barcelona Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Barcelona, a worker placement game published by Board and Dice. Barcelona is a medium weight euro game and we let you know how well it plays.

In the classic British sitcom Fawlty Towers, there is a character played by Andrew Sachs named Manuel. He’s a kind and hard-working employee but is also fairly inept at his job no matter how hard he tries to do well. Manuel is also routinely mistreated by his boss, John Cleese’s snobby and rude Basil Fawlty. Basil hurls insults and the occasional physical abuse at Manuel, often blaming him for any of the issues plaguing his hotel at any given time. When asked to explain Manuel’s errors—perceived or otherwise—Basil will explain to Manuel to his confused guests with the refrain, “You’ll have to forgive him; he’s from Barcelona.”

Today’s review is of the game Barcelona for 1-4 players. It’s designed by Dani Garcia and plays in 75 minutes or so.

Barcelona is action selection and tile/worker-placementish game in which players become builders in 19th-century Barcelona. (Believe it or not the theme is actually pretty good in this one, which doesn’t matter of course, but is still kind of fun.) I’m going to give the briefest of brief overviews of the gameplay here. The game isn’t that complicated, but there are a lot of things to do on any given turn and a whole bunch of edge cases that factor in.

The board for Barcelona has lines of areas that trigger actions along two of its borders and a diagonal running through it. On each player’s turn, they will place two citizen tokens in a stack on a street corner and then trigger the two actions that intersect with the spot where those citizens are now standing. These actions are—for the most part—fairly straightforward. Players can use