Le Havre - Tips & Strategies

Here’s another option for storing the goods tiles and coins, in case you can’t find the little boxes mentioned earlier.

Keep an eye out at your local dollar store for little white buckets (not the huge ones) like those shown here.

Besides holding the cardboard bits during the game, you can also put the larger disks and wooden tokens in the buckets when putting the game away (assuming you ever do put it away).

In a 4 or 5 player game do not worry about getting food for the 1st 3 or 4 turns. Focus on collecting wood, clay, iron, cattle(if there are 2 or more on the space on your turn) and energy. The last is acquired by going to the black market. Additionally collect francs in the 1st round if there are 3 or more and immediately buy the 1 or 2 build building from the town. Yes you are going to take loans, but remember interest on loans is the same whether you have 1 or 10. The practical loan limit is about 7(i.e. I have won having 7 loans more than the person with the LEAST loans). You will want to build as often as possible when not collecting resources. Early Builds that are good are any of the food or materials converting ones, the black market and the wharf. Build the 1st wharf and it will generate resources a lot. Build ships to eventually meet your food demand and to ship. Midgame builds include the second wharf energy generating locations and materials conversion sites and shipping line. End of midgame/early in late game build to erase your debts, or generate money from other players visiting you. Keep an eye on special buildings coming out for especially useful ones during the game(sawmill, ranch, etc…) Try to ship at least once in turn 5 and turn 6 and up to 3 times in turn 7. If you can you want to hold on to resources and build the luxury liner as your final action, but make sure to pay off all your loans before you end your turn.

The setup of your first game can be very overwhelming, more so than Agricola. I’d highly recommend you read through the rules and also watch one of the youtube videos out there, e.g. The UFBRT or Tom Vasel

The videos in conjuction with the rules make learning the game much faster, especially if you are a group of people playing for the first time.

But it could just be because I suck at reading rules.