Components
When you open the box, the first thing you realize is that, although it is the same size as the Agricola box, there is far less material in there (the price point is very different, so one cannot begrudge them this too much).
What is there isn't bad, but there's nothing particularly spectacular. Three game boards, a ton of chits in 8 different resource types (+ Francs), a "worker" and a boat in 5 different colors, and of course, the usual ton of cards.
The game boards are just about useless. This is a card game with chits, the boards are merely a distraction.
Rules/Gameplay
Since there haven't been many reviews, I'll rehash here a little.
On your turn, you generally do two things - fill up two offer spaces, and take a Main Action. You may take any Additional Actions at any time during your turn (as many as you would like). Your Main Action can be one of two things - take an offer pile or enter a building. It's not explicitly stated in the rulebook, but there are three buildings which are Start Buildings which you may enter to build more buildings. These other buildings give you more resources, let you refine resources, let you turn resources into money, or let you build a ship. Additional actions are Buying or Selling a building with/for Francs (different from building one) or paying off a loan. When you sell a building, you sell it to the Town for half the original value. After seven actions have occurred (in a 3-player game, 2 people will get 2 actions, 1 will get 3), there's an end of round phase. If you have 1 Grain or 2 Catttle, you gain an extra of the respective resource. You then owe Food, an amount which steadily increases as the game progresses. If you have a Ship, your food cost is reduced. After 12-20 rounds, whomever has the most money wins (buildings and ships are worth money).
I found the rulebook to be atrocious. I knew nothing of the game going in, and had to learn the rules. The layout was remarkably bad, nothing was in an easy-to-locate place, and several sentences provided a great amount of confusion. Having major rules in the "Examples" side-bar is rather bad form. The standard building cards' ticks and “Start” are poorly designed and even more poorly explained. No one can figure out what you are supposed to do with the Full game, unless you look at the one specific thread on here where Melissa replies with the “official” ruling.
As far as how the game itself flows - there is a level of frustration present from needing to pay so much food so frequently. You're often focused on grabbing a ship every other round or so (or, I have been), and making yourself not use all of your main actions to simply get more food seems to be a major part of the game. I find the food aspect rather dull, actually. You can easily get all the food you need - enough for 3 rounds, and still you're presented with options to get more food remarkably easily. The problem is simply that it will be all you will do this entire round, if you choose to do it. And you don't get any points for food at the end (although unpaid loans seem pretty bad, but I've never seen anyone have even one).
Otherwise, you spend the majority of the game focusing on building/buying buildings. You will be procuring the necessary resources and occasionally refining them. The problem is, the focus here isn't very much on the refinement but rather on the gathering. So you'll need to grab 4 clay and 1 wood in order to build one building. But you actually grabbed 4 clay and 4 wood. Now you have 3 wood leftover, and look, this building requires 3 wood and an iron. So you grab some iron and build *that* building. Of course, a good player is usually more efficient than this, planning ahead a bit better.
But there is a large amount of downtime from such calculations, primarily arising from scanning each of the 20 buildings scattered about the table (in front of their owners, or off to the side if the Town has built it) and figuring out your current status in each of the 8 different resources.
Why they couldn't have taken a note from the well-designed Caylus is beyond me - the buildings are all in a very central location, with very easy-to-see ownership markers upon them. Since they decided to make these boards with the game anyway, having locations for the buildings would have been ideal. They could have gotten rid of the "resource storage" area and put in an area for buildings or something similar – I'm aware that 30 cards take up a lot of space. There are many easy fixes.
Once you have built the buildings, only about ½ of them are used by anyone. The ones that are used are used perhaps 3 times, max. You gain a bonus for people using most of your buildings, but it's never enough incentive to keep the buildings instead of considering selling them to buy a ship.
On the full game:
The food is much more of a problem in the early game here. The game is much improved playing with the full game as a result. There is more time for a feeling of development, however minimalistic it still is. I've found the gameplay to be more enjoyable with the full experience, mostly.
The special buildings are dumb. They are usually pretty useless, with a few grand exceptions. They seem like they're thrown in as “variations” to “increase the replayability.” They're such a minor aspect to the whole thing, however, that this simply doesn't affect any sense of how “replayable” the game is. It's a bit like if you knew in Settlers what all dice rolls except 3 would be for the whole game. Lousy idea, and I hate the whole aspect of them. If they actually were special, and did things better than the other buildings, I'd find them much more interesting. After all, there are only 3-5 used in the game!
Short:
Full:
Fun/Randomness/Luck
A word on randomness. I tend to hate randomness in a game, and it must be a very fun game or a very short game to make me want to play it again.
A word on “fun.” By fun, I am referring to how enjoyable the game is in the time that it takes to play. Some games would be fun if the game took half an hour, but since they take 3, they are no longer any fun. Some games are so fun, they would continue being fun for 3x as long as it takes to play. Sometimes this is characterized by the desire to play again immediately.
There is a bit of randomness in the short game, but it's minimal and not really random. The order of the cards can surely affect what resources you will be gathering/what plan you will be making, but you know it all ahead of time. There is also the mild randomness of the Supply tiles, doesn't do too much, I think – I don't see why it can't be played face-up, aside from the designer simply trying to put a mild bit of excitement in somehow.
The problem is that the game is not very fun. I love calculations, don't get me wrong, it's not “too complex” or anything similar. But grabbing resources to build this building then grabbing more resources to build that building then grabbing more resources to build that building, and don't forget to feed the people once in a while...gets old fast. The food is rarely challenging, aside from making sure you don't focus on it too much, and make too much food for yourself.
On the full game
The randomness here increases slightly; the fun slightly more. The special cards really don't add anything to the game and are mostly ignored. Perhaps one of them will be used once. Also, with more standard building cards, each building is still used about the same amount of time as in the standard - ½ of the buildings, max 3 times. There is a small amount of more fun to it, just in there being a larger amount of time for one to prepare for shipping. It's not much.
*note* 5 stars on fun is if you finish and immediately want to play another game - something which probably won't happen with games longer than an hour. 5 Randomness is simply rolling dice, 0 randomness is entirely predetermined, 1/2 is no randomness, but not a pure labyrinth either.
Short:
Fun:
Randomness:
Full:
Fun:
Randomness:
Plays Best With...
Probably 4, possibly even 5 players could be best here. 3 is ok, but things seem better with more people occupying buildings. 2 players is okay, but there is little interaction, often only groaning that you have to pay a food to build a building instead of getting the free one. Obviously, with more players, you will have more downtime, so take that into consideration.
I've played 2 full solos, one I got 225 points, the other 326. 326 seems very close to the cap, and my interest in playing it solo to improve 30-50 points is null. Probably useful for people developing better logic skills or similar, for a few more games than this. Wears out easily, unlike the Agricola solo.
On the Full game
No change here.
Another note: 5 stars means the game plays best with this, all other stars are relative amounts.
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(pure speculation)Conclusion
The game feels rushed. I can imagine many people involved wanting to capitalize on the super-hot Agricola and getting the product out while the hype is going strong. It feels like it needs quite some further development and is generally disappointing as a game. If this were a video game (i.e. Civ IV), I could see a sizable patch coming quite soon.
Many people have posted about similarities to Agricola – they are minimal, surface-similarities only (i.e. Harvest, feeding).
Le Havre makes me want to play several other, better games with a better production/refinement aspect – Roads and Boats, Neuland, and (hopefully) Duck Dealer. Every time I finish this game, I think to myself about how much better Roads and Boats is at providing a similar level of calculation while being a better game. Or how I enjoy the gameplay of Neuland, even if the end-scoring is continually off-putting. Or how excited I am to try Duck Dealer at some point in the (hopefully) near future.
Perhaps the problem is that you are simply overturning the resources too swiftly. Unlike the three above games, you do not take your 1-2 wood and use it to construct a building which produces clay, 1 of which is used to construct a building to produce iron which is refined into steel which is then shipped away. Instead, the player grabs 4 wood and 2 clay to build a building that they never use, and eventually sell because they need 14 Francs because they can't get 5 wood and 3 energy. It's never just grab 1 of this, or 2 of this, it's always 3-5 of this and 4 of that, so that when one grabs the 5 wood, they're used in the construction of 1-2 buildings only.
This is not to say there isn't something there. There is. But the final package is not finished; whatever spark one can feel lurking behind the mechanics never truly emerges.
It is disappointing. I had no interest in the game to begin with, until I read the rules, and got excited about there being what looked to be a more streamlined refinement game coming out. But there is so little refinement occurring during the game, and so much grab-as-many-resources-as-you-can that I don't feel it is a refinement game at all. Agricola, while having a grab-a-ton-of-resources aspect to it, does so with sense. There is little reason to take 5 reed after your stone house has 5 rooms. The goals are clear, the development is fun. In Le Havre, it is much more of a non-stop buy-fest with far less sense to it.
If it is not a refinement game, then when I try to evaluate it on what it actually is, it is only the more apparent just how lacking the game actually is. Some people may enjoy this game and its grabbing of 1000 resources, I do not.
I suspect that most of the people getting the game and enjoying it have a large association with Agricola in their minds – riding the hype. When they begin disassociating the two in their minds, the ratings will likely decrease.
Posted Tue Nov 18,2008 04:52 am
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