Lookout Games Le Havre |  | Brand: Lookout Games
Category: Toy
List Price: $69.99
Buy New: $47.00
as of 9/6/2010 05:55 CDT details
You Save: $22.99 (33%)
New (15) from $47.00
Seller: The Games Keep, LLC
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 13,645
Batteries Included: No
Age: 12 - 99 years
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 12.5 x 9 x 3
MPN: LOG29
Model: 5510921
EAN: 4015566030091
ASIN: B001N815J8
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | From the creator of Agricola and Bohnanza | | • | Eurogame, measures 12.5" x 9" x 3", weighs 2.73 pounds | | • | Great for solitaire play | | • | For up to 5 players | | • | Tons of replay value |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Le Havre is a city in France and is home to its second largest harbor. In the board game Le Havre, you'll be tasked with managing a harbor, building ships, and constructing buildings. On a player's turn, he will distribute new supplies of goods onto the Offer spaces; then take an action. Goods can be building resources such as wood, clay or iron. Goods can also be food for your dock workers such as fish, grain, and cattle. Actions in the buildings allow goods to be upgraded, such as wood into charcoal in the Kiln. In this case, the wood now supplies more energy rather than becoming a building material. Energy is needed to upgrade clay into brick in the Brickworks, for example. The Kiln and Brickworks are only 2 of the 33 buildings found in Le Havre. 36 other buildings are specialized and only a rare few are used each game, making Le Havre different every time you play.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Great Euro-Style Game May 11, 2010
Zachary Hiwiller
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Le Havre treads on similar ground as Agricola. If you hated Agricola, you probably won't enjoy Le Havre too much. But if you were ambivalent or loved Agricola, you will find a lot to love here.
Whereas Agricola's main dynamic was scarcity (Oh my God, how am I going to feed my people!), Le Havre's is abundance (What am I going to do with all this stuff?) Yes, you still have to "feed" people, build buildings, manage resources, but in Le Havre, it seems so much less desperate and thus interesting.
There is a lot more player interaction in Le Havre, although it can still be played in a fairly solitaire manner. Entering buildings owned by other players requires an entrance fee payed to the player. This simple mechanic opens up a lot of interesting decisions.
The amount of special buildings keeps the gameplay new every single time. I haven't played enough to have any repeats yet. The cards are better designed than the Agricola counterparts, having checkmarks on the back for different ranges of players making sorting much easier. There are an abundance of pieces, but they are all pretty much different types of the same thing so it isn't a pain to manage them all.
I was highly surprised by this one. A definite keeper.
Shipping Game from Popular Board Game Designer November 17, 2009
Andrew J. Brown (Princeton, NJ)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Le Havre is the second game in a series of boardgames by designer Uwe Rosenberg. The first game is Agricola, a very popular and well received farming based game. Uwe is also responsible for other well received card games, namely Bohnanza.
Le Havre is for 1-5 players, but I recommend you begin by playing with no more than 3. The game is much more difficult with 4-5 players and many find it taxing and even overwhelming. This is a positive note for Le Havre, however, as plenty of games support 4-5 players but few are best when you only have two other friends around interested in playing a game.
Le Havre is more complex than most traditional board games and many designer board games. This complexity comes in part from the large variety of options you have each turn. There are 8 (16) different resources you can produce and anywhere from 4-30 buildings you could activate with any given action. This can be overwhelming the first few times you play the game. However, more options can also mean more variety, more re-playability, more depth, more strategy. This is not always true, but I think it is with Le Havre.
In Le Havre there are many different ways to win the game. Sure, you win by accruing the most wealth. But this can be achieved by focusing on building profitable buildings, shipping valuable resources to other ports, or building the very lucrative upscale ships. From my experiences with Le Havre, none of the strategies offers a sure path to victory.
I highly recommend this game if its theme, mechanics, and complexity suit you. It is highly regarded by the board game community [...] (ranked in the TOP 10 board games of ALL TIME). If your only experience with board games is Risk, Monopoly, and Chess, I may recommend other games instead (Thurn und Taxis, Carcassonne, Small World, Settlers of Catan, Ticket to Ride to name a few). But if you are interested in a game with a slightly longer playing time (1.5-2.5 hours) more complexity and arguably more depth and strategy, I would suggest you consider Le Havre.
To ship or to build May 25, 2010
E. Heidel (Mill Creek, WA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The short of it. Each player tries to accumulate enough victory points to win, all while feeding his people. Each turn you collect resources OR use buildings (to build other buildings, provide food, build ships, convert resources, or just make cash). Buildings, ships, and cash all contribute to your final score. Officially, it plays 2-5 players (and has a solo variant). I've played it with 2-5 people and it plays well with all numbers of players, though the challenges vary a bit with different numbers of players. I would suggest 3 or 4 is the optimal number of players, especially the first time around, though 5 works quite well.
The long of it. Each player's turn, they have the option of either collecting a resource OR using a building.
Resources gradually accumulate over the course of player turns. When a resource is collected by a player, it is then unavailable to other players until it begins to slowly accumulate again. Resources allow you to build buildings and ships or feed your people directly. There are eight different resources, all of which have an upgraded version.
Buildings are either constructed or purchased outright. Construction requires the right resource or combination of resources (and the use of one of the construction buildings). Each of the 33 standard buildings offers some different function: construct a ship/building, upgrade a resource, get cash via varying methods, etc. There are also 36 special buildings of which only 5 can appear in any given game. Much like the standard buildings, these have a variety of extra nifty functions.
Ships in the game serve two and a half functions. They are worth points themselves, they provide a certain base amount of food each full round (except for the luxury liner). They may also allow you to ship goods, i.e. turn goods into cash.
Each round is 7 turns, and yes, that means different players will get a different number of turns in a round, on a rotational basis. Each player has one worker token that can be used on a building. Many buildings have entry fees that must be paid to use them, either to the owner or the bank (if nobody owns it). Buildings can only be used by one person at a time, and they stay occupied until a player's worker token is moved off somehow (usually when they use a different building). There are multiple paths to victory, though as always, some specific paths are more easily realized (but not necessarily more effective).
All 33 buildings are used in 4 or 5 player games, with fewer players, you start to remove buildings.
Taken altogether, the game is a typical resource/action scarcity game, with a number of flips and twists. The exact order resources appear in, the order buildings can appear, and which specials are available will all vary from game to game, making repeat plays potentially quite different (in one game, for example, the steelworks building, which allows conversion from iron to steel, did not become available until extremely late in the game, making it nearly impossible to build the higher level ships {steel/luxury}, I have seen several games where certain buildings simply did not get built, which meant some functions were never available).
The game, in concept and play, is quite similar to Agricola (created by the same people, so no surprise there), but there seems to be less randomness in the game (though more than "family-style" Agri) and less dependence on turn order.
The one downside is that it tends to take a hefty chunk of time, and with far more options of what to do on a given turn if you or your friends suffer from analysis-paralysis that gets magnified.
 Fiddly and underwhelming October 9, 2009
Christopher K. Halbower (Muskegon, MI)
5 out of 12 found this review helpful
Le Havre is boardgame published by a host of boardgame makers. To win at Le Havre, players must accumulate the most wealth. When the game ends, whoever has the most gold in terms of gold tokens and buildings is declared the winner.
Le Havre is a worker placement economic engine. Players are given 1 to 4 workers depending upon the number of players. These workers are placed on various parts of the board. The various parts of the board give the players different benefits--usually resources. These resources are used to build buildings, feed your people or buy buildings.
Buildings have a gold value. So building them is more cost effective than buying them since the winner is the person with the most gold. Obtaining the correct resources in terms of type and quantity is crucial to having a competitive score.
The game can take up to 2 1/2 hours with 4 people. This is entirely too long for what Le Havre offers in way of entertainment. There are too many flaws for this game to be such a time investment.
Feeding your people is a tremendous upkeep cost. The way the game is balanced, you must spend about half of your actions feeding your people. That means that on some turns, all you are doing is placing workers to get food so you don't incur the punishments for not feeding your people. This aspect of the game is entirely too tedious. There are plenty of other worker placement games that do not have such a ridiculous upkeep. Take "Pillars of the Earth" or "Kingsburg". Neither of them has an upkeep cost like Le Havre. If the food upkeep in Le Havre is such a wonderful idea, would Kingsburg or Pillars of the Earth be better if a food upkeep cost was added to these games in aa future expansion? I think not.
There are a ton of resources. This is a double edged sword. This makes Le Havre much more complicated than other games. The resources in Pillars of the Earth are: wood, stone, gold, sand and metal. In Kingsburg, the resources are gold, wood and stone. In Le Havre the resources are:
1. Wood which can later be upgraded to Charcoal
2. Coal which can later be upgraded to Coke
3. Iron which can later be upgraded to Steel
4. Fish which can later be upgraded to Smoked Fish
5. Grain which can later be upgraded to Bread
6. Clay which can latter be upgraded to Bricks
7. Cattle which can latter be upgraded to meat and hides (which itself can later be upgraded to leather)
8. and finaly Gold
As you can see, Le Havre has a much higher learning curve than most other games. If this is your cup of tea, then Le Havre will fascinate you. I find this too be quite tedious.
My final criticism of the game is the luxury liner. There are two luxury liners in the game. They are worth over 30 points each. And their resouce cost is not nearly as probitive as their overwhelming point cost would suggest (3 steel and 3 energy I believe). In a typical game, you can expect to score somewhere around 100 to 175 points (with 4 players). This makes the 30+ points afforded by the luxury liners staggering. Only two luxury liners are in the game. And at the start of the game you can determine who is going to get first crack at buying them because all information is available. Thus, at the beginning of a 2.5 hour game, you know if you are going to be able to buy a luxury liner or not. Luxury liners give so many points for such a compartively modest price, that whoever buys them is surely going to be the winner.
Some may argue that you can still win even if your opponents (and not you) buy the luxury liners. This is specious reasoning. The only way you can win a game wherein your opponents bought the luxury liners and you did not would be a game where you had a 37+ point lead. Since the luxury liners give you 36 and 38 points each (if I recall correctly), you need an overwhelming lead to surmount a luxury liner purchase. Thus, you win the game if you buy the luxury liners or if your opponents buy the luxury liners but they otherwise played poorly.
If an expansion for Le Havre comes out (and I'm sure one will be released eventually), perhaps my criticisms will be abated. Until then, Le Havre is a massive, complicated economic engine with a few glaring flaws that make it unlikely to be played at my gaming sessions.
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