Thursday, July 09, 2009

Le Havre, Le Shmhavre

I played Le Havre last Saturday with my friends Vic and Sharon over at the London Mennonite Center. This was my second time with Le Havre, and I'm still not convinced. It doesn't help that I lost again - though by a much smaller margin than last time.

I suppose the root of my difficulty is that I'm not convinced by the theme. If I am going to play a big, long, complicated beast of a gamer's game, then I want it to have some relationship with reality. And to me, Le Havre seems totally divorced from any kind of real economic system that I have ever come across. What is this strange world where goods are picked up for free from the dockside, where you stockpile coal in case you want to build a ship, and where a business's biggest problem is feeding its workers? (Surely you just outsource the staff canteen?) At least there is no money/VP dichotomy. But basically this is "Advanced Puerto Rico", and I think I would rather play a few games of Race for the Galaxy instead, and still have time for something else.

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