La Havre is the latest board game from the designer of Agricola. This time, you play as businessmen on the harbors of France.
The game mechanics are simple: The board consists of seven different piles of goods (money, fish, wood, clay, iron, grain, and cattle), a track with seven spaces (to mark who’s turn it is and what goods need to be added to the different piles), three stacks of building cards (available for purchase or construction), and several buildings owned by the town (available for use immediately).
Each turn, you move your boat marker to the next available slot on the track and put the two goods marked on that space onto the piles. Then, you choose to either take a pile of goods or to move your person marker into one of the available buildings.
One such building is the Building Firm, which lets you spend goods to build one of the buildings on top of one of the stacks of building cards. In addition to being worth points, buildings that you build can be used by other players—for a price. The abbatoir, for example, costs a coin to get into so that you can convert cows into meat and hides. If you own the abbatoir, other players have to pay you to use it, and you don’t have to pay anything to use it.
Every seven turns, you have to feed your workers an ever-increasing amount of food. You can lower this amount of food by building ships at a wharf, but wharfs and ships are expensive.
The game is all about efficiency: you can’t afford to waste precious actions. Spend too many actions getting food for your workers, and you won’t be able to grab the piles of construction materials you need to build buildings. Fail to feed your workers, and you’ll have to take out expensive loans to pay them instead.
At the end of the game, the player with the most value wins (money + the values of buildings and ships).
It takes a couple of games to really get into, but it’s a lot of fun for the serious gamer. Unfortunately, it’s only available in Germany and Australia at the moment for some incomprehensible reason, but if you can import it or hold out until the US release, you’re in for a really good time.
