Le Havre is a port city in France. Le Havre is the new game from the designer of Agricola. Guess which one I now own? Yes, alas, I don’t own a town. However, in the stakes of really cool games, Le Havre is very close to the top.
The game is about developing the port city: building or buying buildings, harvesting goods and then manufacturing them into more useful commodities and – eventually – shipping them away for VPs. Sounds like Puerto Rico? Well, it’s a long way from the game in how it’s played. It’s closer to Agricola or Caylus.
Unlike those last two worthy games, you only have one "worker". On your turn, you can either harvest goods or move your worker to a new building and obtain its effect (which can be converting goods to commodities, gaining goods, gaining commodities, building a new building, or a host of other effects). There’s a couple of tricks here: the first is that you can’t move your worker to a building that someone else has a worker in. This can be frustrating when you really want to build a ship but both wharves are currently occupied. The second is that you can use your own buildings for free… but other buildings cost. So, if you want to use your opponent’s wharf, you have to pay him – either in money or in fish. Well, food. Most commonly fish.
I got to see part of the "simple" or "shortened" game played today by my students. Talk about frustrating – watching the game that I bought (for aus$96) being played by someone else! However, the game recommends it isn’t played by 5 or more players; 3 is the sweet spot. They didn’t get all of the way through the game – indeed, for 4 players, the shortened game still lasts about 2 hours! – but they got about 2/3rds of the way through… and now I want to play it more than ever!
The game is much less component-heavy than Agricola: only 110 cards, compared to over 300. However, it still has a lot of variety. The six special buildings are different each game (from 36), and the order the standard buildings come out can be very different.
I’m not sure when my first chance to play Le Havre with my friends will come. Friday night is D&D, Saturday is Worldwide D&D Game Day, and Sunday is more D&D. Hmm…
The poll for "best number of players" for Le Havre on BGG currently stands at:
solo – 3% best; 67% recommend, 30% avoid
2-player – 25% best; 69% recommend; 6% avoid
3-player – 80% best; 19% recommend; 1% avoid
4-player – 28% best; 62% recommend; 10% avoid
5-player – 0% best; 3% recommend; 97% avoid