In Barcelona, you will take on the role of builders in 19th-century Barcelona working on the new expansion to the city. Your main goal is to construct buildings to accommodate the citizens who want to leave the old city, and in the process, you will also build streets, create tram lines, and build public services. You may even decide to explore. Modernisme, a new architectural and arts style that has been gaining popularity among the rich.

Barcelona is a city building game that is played over a variable number of rounds interrupted by three scoring phases before a final scoring phase. Every round, each player takes a single turn consisting of two or more actions, followed by a building phase (when new buildings are added to the main board), and then prepare for their next turn. There are multiple opportunities to score victory points during the game, but players also gain points at the end of the game from unlocked spaces on their player boards and from Modernisme projects tiles that they acquired. The player with the most points wins.