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Martin Butcher
United Kingdom

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Le Havre » Forums » General
Playing Times - are the rules accurate?
I have a number of fellow players who prefer games that finish in 120 minutes or less. I see in the rules that the estimate time for a four player full game is 200 minutes.

How accurate is this? How much longer is a four player game of Le Havre to a four player game of Agricola (not the family version obviously)? 50% longer? More/less?

(Expressed this way everyone can use their Agricola playing time estimates and scale up/down accordingly)

You only have 35 actions and 20 feedings, most of which are trivial, so surely it can't take that long.

Any thoughts from designer and/or playtesters greatly received.

Martin
Richard Dewsbery
United Kingdom
Sutton Coldfield
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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.
Hanno Girke
Germany
Berne
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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.

Carsten B.
Germany
Muenster
NRW
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Hanno wrote:
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
Road of the Twenty
United States
Gumboro
Delaware
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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.
Last edited on 2008-10-10 08:50:07 CST (Total Number of Edits: 1)
David Hunter
United Kingdom
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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
Dave Eisen
United States
Palo Alto (bay area)
California
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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.
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