Le Havre is the "follow-up" to Agricola and the Australian-language version is slowly making it's way around the English-speaking parts of the world.

I've played the game twice (a 3-player and a 4-player game in English), which I feel is enough to make comments about the game, but not enough to enable me to write a decent review.

So here are some thoughts:


Production Quality

It's a quality game, as you would expect for a follow-up game to Agricola, but it's not without it's flaws. There are some German words left on some of the cards, but these don't appear to affect the game too much, and there are inconsistencies between the rules and the summary cards which does affect game play a bit, but this is easily corrected and the revealed sequence of game play is more logical as a result.

You do get a lot of bits and there’s good artwork on the bits and cards – although the piles of clay look like steaks initially. I would have welcomed a small player board to store my goods on, especially as all goods have two different sides and you don’t want to accidentally turn a chit over to downgrade a pile of bricks into a heap of clay for example.

The game production isn't perfect, but it's an 8 or 9 out of 10 and you'll feel like you've got your money's worth in bits and pieces.


Basic Game Play

I was taught this game, rather than learning it from the rules which is my usual learning method, so I'm not sure I know the 100% correct way to play the game. However, I think I played the core of the game correctly, but some of the actions on the cards may not have been interpreted properly, the Interest payment rules were played incorrectly and I didn't know you could sell buildings once you'd bought them (I was too busy trying to get to grips with the game to realize the significance of the sell option on the summary cards).

The basic game play consists of:

a) Move your ship onto the next empty Supply Tile and place the indicated goods and/or money onto the offer spaces

b) Take An Offer or Use A Building

When you activate/use a building you may have to pay a cost to use the building and then you activate the building's function to achieve something useful to you, such as changing cows into meat and hides, or build a ship, or take multiple goods, or build some buildings.

There are some supplementary actions you can take, such as buying/selling buildings (which are very important actions), but the actions you take during your turn are fairly limited and this makes the game flow quickly from one player to the next.

After 7 actions, the round will end and your people need feeding. Seven doesn't divide evenly into 2, 3, 4 or 5 and this means that every round different players have differing numbers of actions - in a 3-player game the starting player will have 3 actions in the first round whilst the others will only have 2. After 3 rounds each player will have had 1 round where they had 3 actions and 2 rounds where they only had 2 actions - each player gets a round where they are top dog, as it were.

After a few turns you'll have the basic sequence down pat and will be paying more attention to what you are trying to achieve rather than the game mechanisms.

Primarily you are trying to get enough food to feed your people and then buy buildings and/or ships to give you victory points at the end of the game. You can either buy a building/ship for money or build it using goods garnered through game play. It’s nearly always cheaper to build a building/ship than it is to buy it, but sometimes buying a building is the only choice. You are trying to build/buy buildings/ships that give a good return on your investment, both during the game, as people will pay to use your building, and at the end of the game where you can turn two food and four wood into 25+ Victory Points. You can have as many buildings as you want, but there are only 33 Standard buildings, and there will be less than 40 buildings in total.

The game is very repetitive in it's basic play, but luckily the interest comes in which particular actions you take on your turn and these decisions make Le Havre a gamer's game, although it's also very accessible for non-gamers. However, experienced players will trounce newcomers 99 times out of a hundred - Le Havre has a learning curve and those further up the curve will easily beat those below them. If all the players have roughly the same playing experience with the game then the game should be enjoyable for all players and be an even contest - it's too early to say whether there's a first or last player advantage, or whether there are superior strategies to follow that make the game a scripted exercise.

If you avoid the temptation to read all the strategy articles, it's going to take a few games before you start to see strategies that will move you towards a winning position.

Initially your problem is going to be getting enough food to feed your people and the food requirement ramps up unmercifully during the game.

Once you've found ways to feed your people in the game, you can start to pay attention to ways that make your actions more efficient - and the heart of Le Havre is an Efficiency Engine.

Eventually, you'll start to look for ways to gain cheap Victory Points and find winning ways that suit your style of play.

Le Havre is a game where you first learn to stand, then to walk and finally to run. If all the players are at the same learning stage the experience is enjoyable, but it's no fun at all when you're learning to walk and Usain Bolt sitting across the table from you romps away with the game at world record pace.


Replayability

There are two obvious factors that give Le Havre massive replayability - the order that Standard buildings become available during the game and the random draw of Special Buildings.

Standard Buildings

There are 33 Standard buildings and 3 of them have been built at the start of the game - the remaining 30 are shuffled, dealt into 3 equal piles and then sorted by number. This ensures that certain buildings are available early in the game, whilst others are relegated to late game entrants – so the Bakehouse with a cost of 2 clay and sort order of 5 is going to be available long before the Bank with a cost of 4 brick and 1 steel, sort order 29. You can only build the buildings at the top of each pile, so you have a choice of 3 buildings to build and you won’t be trying to create a Town Hall early in the game when brick just isn’t available.

I’d recommend not learning what all the Standard buildings do before playing the game, but once you’ve played the game once or twice, knowing what the Standard Buildings are and how they can be used is what the game is all about. But you need to play the game first before you understand the significance of all the abilities offered by the Standard Buildings.

Once the Standard buildings have been dealt into 3 piles and sorted by number they are spread out so that players can see which buildings are in which pile and the order they will become available. The random order that the Standard buildings become available influence game play in a big way, but the knowledge is available from the start of the game so players can plan in advance which buildings they’d like to build/buy and experienced players will become adept at devising strategies that incorporate the random order of the Standard buildings into their overall plans.

Special Buildings

In addition to the 33 Standard buildings, there are a variable number of Special Buildings that will enter play at regular intervals. Le Havre ships with 36 of these Special Buildings, although additional buildings are already circulating and they will be keenly sought be those that like this game.

In a 4-player game, 5 Special buildings will enter play – in rounds 5, 8, 11, 14 and 17 – and these Special buildings provide additional opportunities/abilities/actions during game play.

During game setup 6 Special Buildings are chosen at random and placed face-down on the game board. At defined points in the game the top Special Building is turned over and becomes available for use by all players during subsequent action phases.

Because only a few Special buildings are chosen for a given game and their order is also random this means that, for 4-players, there are 1,402,410,240 different combinations of Special Buildings. So, even if the Standard buildings don’t influence game play that much, there are millions of different games provided by the Special buildings deck.

Whilst some of the Special buildings aren’t as useful as others, each changes the basic game strategies in fundamental ways and some combinations are possible that can produce incredible efficiencies. For example the Standard building Fishery supplies 3 Fish for nothing, and the Standard building Smokehouse will turn 6 fish into smoked fish and 3 Francs for 1 energy (wood), and the Fish Restaurant will turn the smoked fish into 3 Francs each for the cost of a single food. The addition of the Fish Restaurant (a Special building) at the end of the chain, means that 2 actions for nothing, 1 action for 1 wood and 1 action for 1 food nets the player 21 Francs, and Francs equal Victory Points in Le Havre. Four actions, 1 wood and 1 food for 21 VPs can be a game winning strategy if the Fish Restaurant is available in turn 5 or 8 as this money can be leveraged in all sorts of ways in the game to create even greater wealth for the player.

Offer Tile Order

An additional, but more minor level of randomness is introduced through the placement of the Supply Tiles. The 7 Supply Tiles are placed in a face-down random order during the game setup and are turned over in sequence during the first game turn. However, once turned face-up, they never change order during the game.


Thoughts About The Game

Le Havre is a well-produced game that has massive replayability due to the random game setup (and the possibility of additional Special Buildings yet to appear). It’s easy to learn and flows along at an engaging pace, always presenting interesting choices when it’s your turn. There are a fixed number of rounds, so the game has a definite end-point and a playing time of 3 to 4 hours is about right for learners and experienced players should be able to get this down to 2 hours with practice.

It’s not a brain burner of a game and it’s theme makes it approachable by casual gamers, although non-gamers will probably be overwhelmed by the apparent variety of choices and the number of mechanisms that have to be mastered in order to play the game.

Apart from the minor production problems, I only have 2 other issues with Le Havre: why are the Special Buildings placed face down and why are the Supply Tiles placed face-down for the first round?

Without these pieces of hidden information, the game would be fully determined after setup and there would be no more randomness during game play. To me, this would make Le Havre a more satisfying game. With the billions of game setups possible, it’s unlikely that the game would ever be “solved” and I don’t think that generic strategies will be found that guarantee a game win for all possible setups, so all players having full knowledge of the game setup before the first move is made doesn’t appear to be a game breaker to me. I don’t see why you couldn’t randomly shuffle the Supply Tiles and place them face-up for all players to see before the start of the game, especially as this knowledge is revealed during the first turn.

Also, I don’t see why the Standard buildings are randomly split into 3 piles before being turned face-up for all players to see throughout the game, whilst the Special Buildings are always kept face-down during the game (although there is the possibility of seeing what the next two Special Buildings are and altering their order using the Marketplace building).

I assume that during play testing the game was tried with the Supply tiles face up at game start and that for some reason this led to game balance problems.

However, I’m less inclined to believe that knowing which Special Buildings were due to be built (and when) unbalanced the game that much.

When I get my hands on my own copy of Le Havre, the first few games are going to be played with the Supply tiles face-up at game start and the Special Buildings also face-up for all to see. I’d really like to see how the game plays with these two House Rules.

Another development I pondered was why the Special Buildings weren’t also numbered, which means that once the 6 required for a game were chosen, they could be ordered in the same way that the Standard buildings are ordered, so more powerful Special Buildings will only appear late in the game and useful, but lower powered Special Buildings can appear early in the game when their appearance would be appreciated by the players and they would be more likely to be bought and used.

These caveats aside, Le Havre is a good, solid game and a respectable follow-up to Agricola. I don’t think it’ll topple Agricola from the number one spot, but I expect that Le Havre will settle into the Top 50 and stay there for a long time.

I enjoyed my two games, I’m looking forward to owning my own copy and I think Le Havre will be well received in gaming circles. Whether it’s a flash in the pan or a keeper only time will tell.

From me, I’ll give it 7.5 out of 10 after 2 plays.