The place is the south coast of the English Channel, in the Normandy region of France. Here rests the magnificent port of Le Havre, gateway to Europe. In Uwe Rosenberg’s classic board game, Le Havre, players are competing to become the preeminent shipping magnate, outshining their competitors.

Le Havre has been out of print for a while, but soon it will be sailing back into hobby game stores courtesy of Mayfair and Lookout Games. This version will also include some extras, like the Le Grand Hameau expansion and some other promo cards that have never been included in the base game. Let’s take a look at the game and why it’s one you’ll definitely want to look at if you’re a fan of strategy games.

The game focuses not only on the processing and sale of goods, but on the infrastructure required to perform that processing: the buildings and services that take raw materials and transform them into processed goods (which command a higher price, naturally). That said, maintaining the most basic of requirements — the workers that operate everything — cannot be overlooked.

There are two ways to play the game: full or shortened. The full game with five players can run over three hours, but a shortened four-player game can be played in about two hours. You can adjust the length up or down based on the length of time that you want to play, or perhaps playing a shortened game to learn the rules before moving on to the full game.

Each turn, players reveal goods coming into the harbor. Goods early in the game are basic resources: fish, grain, cattle, and wood, for example. On the back of each of these is a “processed” version: smoked fish, bread, meat, and charcoal. From there they take one of two main actions, either to take all the goods from one dock (all the accumulated wood or clay, for example) or to use their worker. Alternately, players can take special actions, to buy buildings, sell buildings, or repay loans.

After every seven turns, the round ends and the game advances to a new year. This requires players to feed their workers and allows them to take a harvest. During the harvest, players with one grain will grow an additional grain and players will two cattle will breed one additional cattle.  

As the game progresses, players will begin to build ships, both for exporting goods but also to import food to feed their workers. Players will also build a variety of buildings allowing their workers to take more actions, such as converting grain into bread, or smoking fish to making each a more valuable source of food.

Buildings are sometimes owned by the city, meaning that anyone can use the building (as long as someone hasn’t already). But, you may also take control of a building, meaning that a player who uses it must pay a fee on top of whatever effect the building has. Owning the right buildings can be a lucrative extra source of income (or at least to help pay for the buildings that you visit)!

At the end of the game, players add up the value of all their buildings and ships, plus their gold on hand, and whoever has the most gold is the winner!

Le Havre was designed by Uwe Rosenberg for 1-5 players, ages 10 and up. Games take between 30 and 150-minutes.