Districts: Barcelona

Districts: Barcelona is a game for up to 4 players about the different interests and tensions that transforms a city over time and how they are related. The City works as an ecosystem and its citizens try to adapt and transform it to match their needs. Sometimes, such changes come as a by product of some direct actions, some other times it comes from direct developments that come through the administration or private investments.

We assess that it’s not possible to witness such changes and transformations as a neutral witness: everyone is biased by its own experiences and perspective. Due to that, we have developed the different factions as how they perceive themselves. That is, portraying each of them per their own self-defined virtues and what they consider works best for most of the citizens, when not for everyone. Of course, as after all this is a game, for the sake of game balance we have adjusted certain values and actions to provide a better playability.

The game is designed for 4 players (but rules are provided for 3 and 2 players) and the city map is divided in districts. Each district has an array of values that describe its economic and population statistics. These values are a common pool for all the players, this means that your actions deplete some values to increase others, but doing so you might enable a 2nd player to play its actions in that district.

The game has no luck component whatsoever, players' actions have a basic effect no matter where they play them, and an additional effect if certain values are matched. Each faction consumes certain resources and generate others, and not a single faction is autonomous: each of them requires at least one resource they can not generate.

—description from the publisher