La Havre

Sometimes I daydream and I think to myself, "wouldn't it be awesome if you could combine this one thing and another thing?" Those things tend to vary terms of genius or insanity. Combining curry and cream cheese? YAY. Combining Hilary Clinton and a velociraptor? BOO. Combining Helen Mirren and Helen Hunt? SORT OF WANT. Clearly someone, namely Uwe Rosenberg, thought to himself at some point that combining Agricola and Caylus would be grand, and thus La Havre was born.

Le Havre is a game of resource gathering, city building, and investment. It also rivals Agricola and Homesteaders in the amount of bits that the game comes with. There are no less than eight different base resources, and those base resources can be upgraded to better or more valuable resources. There's also money, and buildings, and all the while you must feed your growing workforce every turn.

The game can be challenging for those with little patience. Gathering enough resources to construct buildings can take some time, as every player is very limited to what they can do with a given turn. The game also rewards adaptability, as a plan can change drastically in a given turn. For a game that at times seems to move at a snail's pace, things can quickly require a shift in a player's whole strategy.

All of this is done with more or less the same amount of actions throughout the game. Unlike Agricola, players can't "grow your family" or gain more actions at any point. They have to rely on better buildings to allow themselves more efficient actions, and sometimes must wait for those building to become available.

Yes Le Havre looks all nice and relaxing from the box, but you can quickly plummet into a never-ending spiral of despair, as opponents take the stuff that you had your eye on and build the buildings that you were saving up for. It's a secretly insidious game, and I love it.