Uve Rosenburg's Second Best Game

I love Uve Rosenburg games.  Tonight we played my second favorite: Le Havre (The Harbor).  My very favorite is Ora et Labora, (Prayer & Work), but since we actually had 3 hours to kill, I thought it would be fun to play the full version of Le Havre.  My daughter and Nephew both played along.  Steven had played probably about 5 games before, Molly about the same, except she has played quite a bit against the digital opponents on the iPad.

If you’ve never played, the game is developing a bustling economy in the setting of a commercial harbor.  Raw Materials (like wood, clay, fish, coal & iron) accumulate, and you have to choose whether to spend your limited actions collecting these resources, using the resources to construct buildings, or to visit your buildings (or even those built by your opponents).  The buildings are the heart of the game--each different building offers a different mechanism for processing your raw materials into refined goods, or turning them into cash.  Of course every economy costs something, and in the case of Le Havre, you must feed your workers every round, so you need to find ways of producing ever-growing quantities of food.

Since buildings and the resources enter the game in a semi-random fashion, there’s a ton of variety from one game to the next, and myriad paths to victory.  When deciding player order, I drew last chair, and I did feel that I was always picking up left-overs for the first portion of our game.  When I first learned the game I would never take loans, just because I don’t like debt in real life.  But I’ve seen time and again, the person who deftly manages some loans early in the game is able to build a stronger economy than those that burn up crucial early game time in producing food to eat.  The debt-strapped player, however, is able to use their better infrastructure to pay off those loans with cash to spare.  So I’m not afraid of debt in this game anymore, and I started taking out loans early on.  This allowed me to start catching up and move into more of a controlling force in the game.  I did fairly well, and my buildings were the most frequently used in the game.  I had the first wharf, where ships could be built.  I built the brickworks, and most of the expensive buildings require brick.  I had the smoke house and the bakery, so if you wanted to upgrade fish or grain, you had to come to me.  But Steven had the abattoir, and beef was king in this game.  I was able to build some of the mid-grade ships (2 Iron, 1 Steel), while Steven built the entire fleet of wooden ships.  Molly went the industrial route, building the Steel Mill and the Iron works, and was able to build 2 of the 3 Luxury Liners at the end of the game.

There was one Special building that came out called the Business Office, which I thought was extremely powerful, so I tried to be very clever and use it as much as possible, and keep the others out of it.  Steel is the most valuable commodity and the most difficult to produce.  And this building allowed you to buy a Steel for the low cost of 4 goods, and offered an option to pick up a Leather, which is another lucrative resource.  But you can only get one Steel at a time, and those turns are the one currency that has a finite limit.  In the end, nobody else even bothered.  Molly had the buildings to produce Steel quickly, and Steve was more concerned about shipping goods on his wooden ships.

In the end, Steven made a mistake that derailed his entire plan.  He had been accumulating massive amounts of refined goods that he was going to ship for a tidy profit, but he forgot he needed energy to power those ships.  So I was able to swoop in and used his Shipping Office to export my pile of Steel and Leather for 56 points.

Molly had built the Bridge, but she didn’t know what it did.  It’s a quick way to turn leftover goods into cash.  It’s not as profitable as sending your commodities to far-off ports by ship, but you can make up for that by dealing in large quantities with a small profit.  When I pointed this out to Molly, she really had no interest, but Steven perked up his ears.  He had accumulated a massive herd of cows, slaughtered them all into steaks, and tanned the hides into leather.   Shipping them all could have been worth well over 100 points, but would have taken him several turns and required a prohibitive amount of energy.  Once he realized that he could liquidate the whole lot in one trip over the Bridge on the River Seine, he parlayed his surplus stock into 43 points on a single turn.

I too had been planning to off-load all my excess goods over the Bridge on my final turn.  But I had miscalculated, and didn’t have that much surplus to move.  So I had mostly wasted that final action, only netting 7 points, while Molly used that same turn to build a Luxury Cruise Ship worth 32 points!

Final Damage:

Michael’s Shipping Strategy: 191 points
Molly’s Luxury Ships: 212 points
Steven’s Plan B Trucking Scheme: 217 points

Airplane Games for Kids (and adults like me)

Last night I got way too excited about a game I played called Loopin Louie.  In part because it brought back to mind a forgotten game I used to own as a kid.  At first I couldn't recall its name, but after a few minutes searching on The Geek, I found it: Chutes Away!  You had to control your plane, and watch through the view-finder, trying to release your paratroopers so they'd fall into the targets on the spinning map below.  It was a bulky, noisy, solitaire game with no variation whatsoever, as the same map spun relentlessly past your crosshairs.  And I played it over and over until it was finally crushed during a game of, "Let's see how many of us can hide from my little brother by squeezing into this little closet."

Well, Looping Louie is a whole different kind of fun, with enough tension to get a guy like me up out of his seat.  (Well, perhaps my childhood ardor for "Chutes Away!" disqualifies me as an objective standard, but this is my blog, so just deal with it.)  In Looping Louie, you've got a barn with 3 chickens perched on the roof, and a crazy pilot named Loopin Louie barnstorming his plane around the neighborhood terrorizing each player's chickens in turn.  Your poultry's only defense is a little thingy like a vertical pinball paddle which can be used to divert the plane's course away from your barn and hopefully send him over to make kung-pow of your neighbor's coop.

Granted most of my excitement stemmed from the fact that I was awesome in the first round, which ended with everyone's chickens dethroned, while all 3 of mine remained unscathed atop their perch.  It was promptly proposed that everyone needed to "...take Michael out."  I made some sort of off-hand comment about it just being "my kind of game."  Let the record show that in reality, dexterity games are NOT my kind of game, as I have mediocre hand-eye coordination at best.  But 42 years of experience and memory were temporarily blinded by the irrefutable proof before my eyes: My Last Hens Standing!

I then embarked upon an absolute failure to recreate my previous results for the next 6 rounds, slipping steadily from first place to last.  Some of my fowls weren't even foiled by my foes; several times there were jostled by the adrenaline-fueled pounding of my own poultry protection paddle!

At the last possible moment, my luck (for that's surely all it was) began to return, as I managed to win again, bringing myself back into contention.  It was sudden death, and anyone could emerge the victor when, to my delight, first Darrel, then Steve were eliminated from the game.  I was head-to-head with Mark, who may have had an edge because he was up-wind of me.  But in the end his advantage mattered not, as I launched Louie into a stratospheric loop that bypassed Mark's farm entirely, not returning to earth until he was in a dive-bombing beeline for my own barn.  In the end, all that remained was a pile of splintered wood and scattered feathers, with the faint smell of my crushed hopes lingering in the gentle breeze.