Le Havre

16th December 2021

It's a Thursday and we're round Simon's for some gaming.

​The game of the night was Le Harve; have you ever had the urge to run a business on the French coast, construct buildings and ships, manage goods, feed your ever expanding workforce and avoid going into debt?
If the answer is yes, then maybe, just maybe, Le Havre is the game you're lookng for.

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What's in a game?
Le Havre uses a lot of components, I mean it, A LOT!

• Game board: The game board is composed of 3 large tiles that are placed down together to form the board. It depicts the titular harbour with a wharf and warehouses and it's a fairly busy board too with a lot of spots and locations.
  Resource spaces: There are 6 spaces for the games 8 resources, wait, did I say 8 resources, since the resource tiles are double-sided that means the game actually has 16 resources. Finally there's a spot for the 17th resource - money.
  Supply spaces: There a row of seven of these circular spaces directly beneath the resource spaces.
  Offer spaces: And beneath the port spaces are 7 offer spaces. As the game progresses, goods will move from the resources down to the offer spaces.
  Special buildings: this is where the special buildings deck goes.
  Building proposals: These are 3 spaces which will contain regular building cards which can be built but not bought.
  Ship spaces: There are 4 spaces for the 4 different types of ship that will appear during a game.
  Round cards space: Finally, there's a space for the round cards, there not actually round but are used to track the game's round.

The game board... so many resources!

• Cards: Le Havre uses numerous decks of cards.
  ​Round cards/Ship cards: Not all of these are used during a game, depending on player count.
  ​They are arranged in numerical order and are used to not only track rounds, but other events such as harvesting and bringing special buildings into play. They are also double sided and on the other side are ships. When a round is over, the round card is flipped to the other side and becomes a ship available to be bought, thus more and more (And better.) ships become available as a game progresses.
  Ship cards are very useful cards, they allow players to trade resources for cash and also provide food when needed.
  Building cards: These come in 3 types, starter, standard and special and can be bought or used by players. They are functionally more or less identical though. Each card has a cost to buy in some combination of resources and money, it may also have a symbol for it's type. Then the card lists what ability it has, typically this is generate or upgrade resources, although some will construct buildings or ships. 
  Standard cards have a couple of bits of extra info, first, in the top right corner it shows a number, this is the sort order number and determines the order in which cards appear. Finally, at the bottom it repeats the buying info, which will be displayed when the cards are put out.
  Loan cards: If a player runs of cash, then they can take a load card to acquire more money, although this comes at a price...
  Buttery/Player guide: This double-sided card has a buttery on one side and a quick guide to the rules on the other.
• Tokens: As with cards, Le Havre makes use of a lot of tokens. All of them are made of card.
  Cash: These round tokens represent francs.
  Resources: All of these are double-sided, with the basic resource on one side and the upgraded resource on the other. Resources provide food and energy amongst other things and include.
  Cattle/Meat: Produces more cattle and food on the upgraded side.
  Grain/Bread: Produces more grain and also produces food
  Iron/Steel: Used for building.
  Clay/Brick: Also used for building.
  Wood/Charcoal: Produces energy.
  Fish/Smoked fish: Produces food.
  Coal/Coke: Produces energy.
  Hide/Leather​: Can be sold.
• Meeples: Each player is given 2 wooden meeples in their colour, a ship which is used in the port and a disc, which is essentially a worker and placed in buildings.
• Supply tiles: There are 7 of these circular tiles that fit on the supply spaces. Each tile displays an action that must be resolved during the game.

​The art in Le Havre is a bit of a mixed bag. The game board uses fairly simplistic and colourful illustrations that I personally found clear, distinct and looked quite evocative, the same is true of illustrations on the cards. However, the tokens used monochromic artwork which is a little old school. Having said that, it was always clear what they represented.
Which brings me to iconography. Between all the different actions on all the building cards in particular, Le Havre uses a fair amount of iconography. Much of it is straightforward and apparent but some of it will require looking up in the rules. none of it game-breaking though.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Round cards: Take the round cards appropriate for the number of players and place them face-up in numerical order on their allotted space. Round cards come into affect at the end of each round.
• Supply tokens: Shuffle the supply tokens into a face-down stack and then place 1 of each face-down on the row of supply spaces.
• Starter buildings: Put out the 3 starter building cards next to the board. These are owned by the town. Furthermore any buildings that are built by players are also owned by the town (Until players purchase them, that is.).
• Building cards: Shuffle the standard building cards into a face-down deck, then deal the cards into 3 smaller face-down stacks.
  Now turn each stack over and sort it buy its sort order number in the top right corner. Thus certain cards will appear earlier in the game than others. Each of the 3 stacks goes into a space on the board but they do not sit stacks. Instead, spread each stack up, so that the info on the bottom of each card is visible and players can see the cost of upcoming cards. Only the top card in each proposal space are available to be built by players.
  Special building cards: Shuffle the deck of special building card and deal 6 cards face-down into a deck on their space on the board. The rest of the deck will not be used in this game.
• Resources: Put all the resources into their specified spaces, then place 2 money, 2 fish, 2 wood and 1 clay token into their respective offer spaces.
• Player: Give each player a ship and disc meeple in their colour as well as 5 cash and 1 coal. Each player's ship should be placed just left of the first supply tile.
• First player: Determine a first player.

On to play
Acquisition of wealth is goal in Le Havre and money becomes victory points at the game end.
The game is played over a number rounds dependant on the number of players. In each round there are 7 turns, you will note that this means that players will not have an equal number of turns and this is by design.
In their turn each player must perform the supply action and has a single main action they can also perform, in addition the active player can also perform buy/sell actions.
When all 7 turns have been completed, there are some end of round actions to resolve before moving on to the next round.
Free actions: These can be performed by the active player at any time.

• Loan: If a player does not have the money to pay for something, then they can take a loan card which gives them 4 currency to spend, paying off a loan card costs 5. Every loan card that a player has during the game end will essentially cost them 7 victory points, so you don't want to keep them!
  Additionally, sometimes players with loan cards will have to pay interest to the supply.
• Buying/Selling: The active player may buy or sell any number of available buildings or ships at any time in their turn, provided they meet the requirements of course. Players cannot buy buildings in the building proposal spaces, because they're not built yet.
  When something is sold, it is at half the cash cost for the building and is sold to the town who will now own it.

Turn actions:

• Supply action: The active player must perform the supply action. This involves moving their ship meeple on to the first available supply token (Going from left to right.), turning over the tile and resolving its action. Usually this involves moving tokens from one resource supply to it's respective offer space.
  Supply tiles are only turned over once during a game and when revealed stay in the same order for the remainder of the game.
• Main action: There are 2 main actions available to the active player and they can perform 1 of them only.
  Take offer: The active player take all the resources on 1 offer space which they can use immediately.
  Enter building: The active player may take their disc and place in any available unoccupied building and use that building's ability.
  Available buildings include any buildings owned by the town or the player, furthermore, a disc may be placed in another player's building, but this will incur a entry fee that must be payed to that player.
  Next player: Once a player has completed their actions, play progresses to the player to the left.

A round ends when the player on the last supply token finishes their turn and leads directly into the end of round actions. This involves resolving the actions on the current round card and include the following.

• Harvest: If this action occurs, players with cattle or grain increase them respectively.
• Feeding: All players must feed their populations, this requires discarding food, how much is needed depends on the round card and a ship lowers this requirement. Money can be used in place of food and must be used if a player does not have enough food.
• Construction: A building from the standard or special buildings may be built by the town and now becomes available to be used or bought players.
• Ship: The round card is flipped over and becomes a ship, it is placed into its relevant spot and can bought by players.
• Next round: All player ship meeples are placed back at the start of the supply track and a new round begins. Whoever was last in the previous round is the starting player in this one, thus they get a double-turn.

Endgame
When the final round is completed, all players have 1 final main action they can perform, after this, the game goes to scoring.
Now each player calculates their wealth which are victory points. This is done by totting up the following:
Value of all building and ships a player owns.
Cash they possess.
Every loan card a player still possess at the game end deducts from the total.
Scores are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
When playing Le Havre players will need to pay attention to several areas of the game. Buildings are very important and players will probably spent a significant number of actions on them, not only do they have to think about to what they've built, what the town owns and what it available to build but what other players have built. Being able to make use of other player's building adds an interesting spin on the game.
Players will need to adapt their strategy to the buildings that become available and while there is a ordering number for buildings, it's still no guarantee of the actual order they become available.

That doesn't mean you can risk ignoring ships or acquiring resources of course, food is vital, probably the single most important thing in the game, you'll constantly need food otherwise you'll eventually be plunged into spiralling debt.
Managing all the resources is also key and the game deliberately forces players to make the hard choice between using a building or taking a resource from an offer space. Resources tend to be relatively scarce at the start of the game and player's will want to optimise their strategies.
Generally money can be used in place of some resources but it's essentially sucking up victory points and getting players closer to having to take a loan, something to avoid if you can.

Players will need to also pay attention to the supply track and their position on it and when their turns will come up, as well as when resources will be moved into the offer spaces.

Even though there were some more rules which I skipped over describing, I wouldn't call La Havre a very heavy game. I did find it a little fiddly with the occasional little rule popping up here or there and at the start I did find the game a little obtuse.
​Once you get over that hump Le Havre becomes a mostly straightforward game and proves a challenging game with meaningful decisions to make.

I do have a criticism of Le Havre though - and that's the playtime, it's just too long! This is a known issue too as the rules contain a 'shortened' variant of the game!
A 5-player game is expected to take 210 minutes over 20 rounds, that's 3 ½ hours and quite frankly, that's an underestimation.
Think about it; 210 minutes over 20 rounds is 10 minutes 30 seconds per round and each round has 7 turns, that works out at 90 seconds per turn. Do you think that the kind of players that like this type of game spend just 90 seconds per turn? If every player spends 2 minutes taking their turn instead of 90 seconds, it would add 70 minutes to the playtime. 😭

It meant that the down time between turns felt like it lasted forever and at times was just more frustrating than fun or compelling, which was what I ultimately took away from it.

If you like resource-management games that are slightly on the heavy side, then Le Havre might be worth a look, provided you can commit the time.
To be honest, it's a game that rainy, chilled Sunday afternoons are perfect for.