With Agricola, one of the main causes of downtime is players analyzing their occupation and minor improvement cards - both in terms of what has been played, and what could be played.

These individually-held cards are largely absent in Le Havre. Some things are built by the players, but from a much smaller pool of collectively-held cards, so I would have thought that the actions in Le Havre might be a bit swifter. Though I have no idea whether Le Havre is indeed slower to play than Agricola.

Well - this is a point where Uwe and I just disagreed: the playing time we put in the rules.
I'd say it just depends on the players - how long they tend to think and if they're prone to AP.

It takes a couple of games of LH to get used to all the things that you can do - but as soon as you got the hang for it, it plays pretty smooth. So, for experienced players, it could even be shorter than your Gric.

Yep, this was my impression, too.

Greetings,
Carsten

Early games of Agricola clocked in at about 30 minutes a player. Most of my games average 20 or less depending upon the players.

So I'm going to guess the 50 minutes per player here is an overestimation for the sake of full disclosure.

Pretty close, especially for new players. With rules explanation I suspect we took close to 4 hours to play our first game last night.

However it was unnoticed that the game took so long basically because there was so little downtime between your turns.

Cheers
David

Took us 3.5 hours for a 3 player full game the other night. All new players, one of the three generally slow at games and the other two generally play at a pretty good clip. This included teaching time.

I've never played a 4 player game of Agricola that's taken longer than 2 hours, and that's including one 4 player game where we drafted all 56 cards from a combination of the 3 decks!

I've only played one long version of 4 player Le Havre and it took 3.5 hours! We were all fairly new to the game, but I can't ever imagine, no matter how fluent we get at it, cutting 1.5 or more hours off that time. That's 43% reduction in game length!

Perhaps I'm wrong...only time will tell. Since that long version of Le Havre, I've logged 5 more plays, all short version. Tonight I think I'll be doing a 3 player long version...so I'll see how it goes.

I've fairly regularly played 4 player long version of Le Havre. I think 2 hours (or less) with experienced players is reasonable, depending on your group. If you're chatty, maybe not, but it's not entirely unreasonable.