LogFAQs > #964278885

46. Le Havre

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/35677/le-havre

Category: Player vs player
Key mechanics: Tableau-building, card-drafting, economic
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 6
Game length: 150-180 minutes
First played: 2021
Experience: 1 play with 3 players

In Le Havre, you're running your business out of a port by building up a tableau. Each round, common resources pile up, and you either get to grab some of those common resources or use a building - i.e. part of someone's tableau (including your own). The overall goal is to amass the most money using these buildings to perform economic tasks such as building more buildings, collecting resources, and transforming resources into points.

Le Havre is an older Uwe Rosenberg title, and it shows a lot of the Uwe fascinations: lots and lots of different actions, breeding animals, converting one resource into another, feeding workers. For most of the game in my experience, it was satisfyingly complex and juicy - but toward the end of the game, tableaux exploded so much in size that I was entirely unable to follow what other players were doing and what trades they could make, and mostly just lasered in on buying the buildings that seemed like they'd pay off most.

I wish I could say more, but the game became progressively more heads-down and fever-dream-ish! I'd still give it a shot, but would probably prefer to play with two players so there's a little less to track and so that it plays faster.