Full set up and teach for Le Havre (2008), the third game in our Uwe Rosenberg series. Channel your inner port master by gathering, processing, and shipping off goods for the most profit.
00:00 intro
00:34 setup
08:13 game flow
09:34 building actions
27:29 free actions (buying and selling buildings)
31:29 the Shipping Line
34:53 final, post-action
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hi welcome to board game Express today we’re going to look at our third game in our U Rosenberg series laav all right welcome to the port city of laav where in the hustle and bustle of France’s uh probably one of their largest port cities at the time you are going to be gathering Goods uh using them processing them in the buildings that the you are going to construct over the course of the game and then you’re going to be often shipping those back out for victory points point or you’re simply going to score for having buildings and ships all right let’s take a look at the setup so there are a lot of game pieces on this board you’re going to want to put out all your resources in the appropriate places in a supply uh now I will take this opportunity to point out that you can see that the game is a little messy so you know wouldn’t hurt to have little uh plastic cups like these these make it very handy to keep things organized and when you want to put your game away makes it a little quicker so just a little note if you’re not using these things yet uh now the board itself will tell you that at the start of the game you’re going to want to put out two money right here two fish two wood and one clay and one other thing I want to point out about these research chips in case you haven’t seen them before uh these are chips that actually have two sides to them so for example on this side this is wood and on the back side this is going to be charcoal so all of the tiles are like this so basically as you are playing the game and you’re collecting things just make sure you keep things on the proper side because if it’s on the wrong side then you actually have a different item right just that will end up there all right uh last thing to set up for the board itself will be these seven what are called uh resource markers so you just shuffle them up and have them at the ready at the start of the game and then then there are these four decks of cards that you will want to prepare uh one of the decks of cards is going to be labeled special building so it just says a special building on the back you can Shuffle this up and the game will only need six of them uh you can just lay them all on there or you can just draw the top six and put them right in the special building stack here and the rest will not be used and then you are going to have three what are called starter buildings they will say so on the back they all all have this green title here they are owned by the town to start the game so you’re just going to leave them right here you will have a deck of what are called Harvest or round cards and on the back they are ships so the number of players in the game is going to dictate which ones you use and in what order so let me show you an example of a card right here so on the back there’s going to be a couple of numbers right on the very left is going to be a column indicating whether it’s for a 1 2 3 4 or five player game so I’ve set up for example a three-player game right now and there’s going to be a pair of numbers on the side the number in the dark circle is where that card lies if you are going to choose to play a long version of this game and the light circle on the bottom right is going to be for a short version now I’m going to be the rules of them are pretty similar I’m going to be covering a long game which goes through all the rounds and so this number one means that this card is going to be the top of the deck and so I have right here this will be the second card in the deck and so on and so forth so what you want to do is you’ll want to go through the deck 1 2 3 4 just kind of count to make sure you have it 5 6 7even 8 and then here is an example of a card that will be removed so this is a card that will be used in the four or the five player game not in the three so you’re going to take that out and there should be one more of these like that there we go so here’s the second one so these will be out of the game a three-player game is going to go 18 rounds so that’s why there will be 18 cards over here so set them with the ships facing down and then finally your last deck is going to be the one that takes a little bit more work this will be What’s called the uh standard buildings deck and to look at this one there’s going to be indicator on the left side which again for 1 2 3 4 or five players there’s going to be a check mark telling you whether that building should be in the game for either a long or short version of that player count so for example this card here on top has a dark check mark that means for a three-player game it is in the game I’ve already separated out there are going to be three that are not so you can look over here and see that there is no check mark there that means these three cards are removed from the deck so out of a 30 basic buildings just make sure that you use The Right Ones based on the player count so these are out as well so out of the ones that remain it should be a multiple of three there are 27 you will Shuffle up and then the first thing you’re going to do is you’re going to deal three decks and they correspond to these three what are called building proposal spaces now to save a little bit of time I’m just going to kind of throw them throw them three at a time and then I think yeah one left over all right so you’re going to create Three Stacks this way now I’m going to demonstrate with one stack what it is you want to do and this is something you’re going to want to do with all three stacks to set up your game this is the part that of the setup that’s going to take the most time there’s a number in the upper corner of each building and that is sort of a timing guideline so they’re all numbered one 1 to 30 what you want to do for each stack is you want to actually take the time to sort them so that the lowest numbered ones are on top and the highest number ones are in bottom so in that way the stronger buildings which have the higher numbers are going to come out later in the game and got a 28 over here I got a 17 and oh wow that’s that’s a very weird distribution and a number five so I don’t know that I’m going to be able to show you all of these but you can kind of see uh from here I have the building number five I have a building number 12 I think I had a building number 16 something like that 16 17 there’s a 14 in there so stack them in numerical order do that with each one and then you are ready to go now I’m I’m not going to do with all three just to save time you don’t need to see me do this three times when you set these out you will want to do it so that the bottoms of the card the information down here which is what the build is on what it costs to build you will want that visible so I’m going to do my best to kind of get it to line up over here so there’s cards 7 through n there’s cards 4 through six and then card 1 two 3 looks like we got a Bake House a Warf and a brick so you’re going to want to lay it out like this and what this will do is it will let everyone see what is available in each of the piles now you can only access the very top card in the pile I’ll get to that when we talk about the in the actual rules uh but this way people can sort of make plans um because the top one is the only one available at any given moment people can sort of decide what it is they want to build and when they think they’re going to try and build it all right so that is the board itself resources starting resources and then four decks to arrange now for each player it’s a lot less work everyone gets one disc that’s basically a worker and uh random start player will get this token to keep for the entire game uh everyone’s going to get $5 and one coal now make sure it’s on the coal side not the coke side on the back all right now that everyone’s ready to go let’s talk about the game Flow uh laav actually doesn’t have much to do on each person’s turn you basically are going to set up your turn and then take one action now to set up at the beginning of the game since these have not yet come out the you’re going to randomly take one and put it on here so uh and put your boat on it just to represent the term now this is going to tell you which of the two resources here are going to get put onto what are called the offer spaces those are the spaces that the players can actually take from so right now I just drew a uh fish and a clay and so you’ll take one of these take one of these and add it to What’s called the offer space and now you take your main turn now when you take your main turn that’s where your player a is super useful so actually the the whole thing is going to be very useful because it will tell you to move your ship reload the offer spaces and then you can do one of two things you can either take all the goods from one of these seven action spaces and then you’re done so just if you say hey I want three fish do your claw in person ation and then they drop down right there you’re done the second thing you can do is you can use a building to do that you will place your disc your worker there on the building that you want to use and then trigger whatever text it is now uh it is basically worker placement so you can’t go where someone already is and on another also important note you cannot reuse the building you are currently in so if I had come here on a previous turn I would would have to go elsewhere now the game only starts with three buildings in the very beginning so it will not be easy to use these in fact the first couple things that people are going to do is just grab resources then the next person is going to put out grab resources and so on but it is now time well actually just as a quick demonstration let’s say green gets the next turn he’s going to put out $1 he’s going to put out one and the very first iron and then green gets to say you know what $3 that sounds pretty good I’ll take it that’s it Green’s done next red is going to draw the next one and say hey that’s a clay and a wood clay and a wood and red can say well okay fine Three Wood mine there you go and then on Blue’s turn blue just keeps flipping filling moving action so on and so forth and just rinse and repeat now let’s talk about the buildings themselves because there are going to be some important ones uh let’s see let me demonstrate with a couple of them let’s say oh that wow that’s a very fancy example but eh whatever oh let me use this one instead okay so there are of course a lot of different buildings 30 they’re all unique um but they fall into a couple different categories of what they do so this is sort of most uh straightforward example of one so the very top left is going to be what it costs to build the building when you build it I’ll sort of explain the building action in a moment the upper right has the number that allows sorting and there is sometimes going to be a cost up here I’ll demonstrate that one in a moment and then there’s going to be a couple of symbols on the upper right side as well so sort of like the type of building it is there’s about four or five kinds of symbols there’s also a fishing and a hammer icon those are all just going to be referenced in the actual buildings themselves so one building will say if you have a fish icon etc etc oh like this one so this is an example of a building that just gives you stuff if you were to put your worker in here you get three fish plus you get one fish per that symbol that you already own in your taow so this is the most basic kind now another other kind is a converter so this bake house here is an example of a converter if you were to put your worker here what it basically allows you to do is for every grain that you have so you can bake it that’s what you do with grain and that essentially allows you to flip it over now that means that whereas the grain cannot be used for food on the back once you do that that little pot symbol means means it’s now bread it can be used as food at any time you need food and the conversion requires uh the little light bulb is electricity and then you will also in addition to flipping into bread you will also get some money out of it now the arrow is the conversion and there are sometimes going to be a number on it so if it had that that would be a limit so if had said X5 that means you can only do this conversion five times if there is no number you can do it as as many times as you want now quick note about this uh half payment so to convert bread you have to pay a half a unit of electricity and just as a quick demonstration electricity can be found on a wood tile for example so if you had to pay one electricity you just throw away a wood tile anytime the game has these fractions if you ever need to round you have to round against the player so if I were trying trying to convert five grein into bread I would unfortunately have to round 2 and 1/2 up to three I’d have to pay three electricity and when you get paid for it you get to round two and a half down you’ll only get two money out so of course when you use these kind of buildings you’re usually trying to go for an even number but you know it’s not always in your control so this is a second kind of building a kind of a converter now the third type of building and the one that you’re going to be using a lot in the beginning is is one that allows you to build things so this is essentially a build action and a build action says you can build one of the buildings on the very top only of these three stacks so right now I think I left oh actually I moved the bake house but that had the bake house on top you could do that one whatever was on top of that one or what is on top of that one pay the wood or clay or whatever resources are necessary and so let’s say you build it you would immediately put it in front of your position and because in this game it is not only possible but it’s very common that other people use your buildings it’s just sort of a convenience to point it towards the center of the board so other people can read what you have uh later on because you’re you’re going to have a lot of buildings eventually so it’s going to be a little hard to see you know without keeping them a little bit organized all right so that is what a construction action is now let me use this opportunity to point out another thing that is going to differ and I guess the building firm is probably the easiest way to do it now at the start of the game the town itself owns these buildings so anybody can use them anybody can use the neutral buildings there is one final symbol to explain there’s a requirement in the upper right sometimes so for example the building firm on the left does not have anything printed up there but the building firm on the right has this little pot that basically means the player who uses this one no extra fee you get to build something pay the resources take the building if you were to use this one presumably because this one’s already occupied then there’s a cost to entering the building the entry fee you’d have to pay one food before you’re allowed to use the building uh if it is owned by the town you just pay to the bank if it is owned by another player you pay the player so this is one of the reasons why it’s kind of important to build buildings you’re going to get points for it also you might get compensated if the building has an entry fee attached your opponents have to pay you each time you do not pay yourself of course you can use your own buildings for free so that is another thing you will see on these buildings and finally maybe the last type of building the note that you will run across actually by Rand chance it came up right here very handy uh the warf cuz what would a port city be without its ships now the warf very similar to the building firms that construct buildings allows you to construct ships now at the beginning of the game there won’t be any however as each player takes their turn and you’ll note there are seven turns before you get to the end so just kind of Imagine playing this out turn four Blue’s going to go here turn five Green’s going to take his or her turn turn six Red’s going to take his turn and then interesting little rotational mechanic over here there are seven turns so actually player one in a three-player game going to get kind of lucky and get to do three turns now once blue finishes the turn you’ve hit the end you’ve reached the end of the round now it’s time to process the round card so and that will come into play with the shipping in a moment so let’s take a look at what’s on the round card the first thing that will or won’t be on it is what’s called The Harvest so this card does not have a harvest just to show you the following card next turn will that’s what it will look like if there is an icon up there that means the players will have a harvest if there’s a harvest if you own at least one grain you gain a grain if you own at least least two cattle you will get one more cattle basically a breed so uh unlike some of the other games where things might be fancier you might have um you know storage limits this game has no such thing you can grab as much as you want there’s no limit to how much you can hold so basically if you have a grain get a new one if you have two or more cows get one new cow that’s the Harvest the second thing you’re going to look at is this pot symbol that is let’s face it it wouldn’t be a up game if there weren’t feeding so that is what all players have to pay in terms of food so everyone has to pay two food if you have it so maybe you have some fish right uh maybe you were no you’re not going to have any bread this early in the game that’s very unlikely in the beginning of the game honestly fish is really the only good way to get food uh looks like yeah cat cattle are going to take some processing if you have the food you have to pay the food if there are begging markers in this game if you do not have the food you can pay with money it does not go the other way if you ever for any reason need to pay money you have to pay money if you need food you can pay you can give up the food or presumably you can buy the food you need by giving up money now money is generally more valuable so you try not to do that too much but that is something you can do now uh it unlikely it happened very very early in a game because you do start off off with a little bit of resources but in the later parts of the game it is possible you will not have enough food sometimes that happens so if that happens then you are covered you get to take loans so if you don’t have enough money to cover your food needs then you take a loan you take a card get four money immediately pay up whatever amount you are short if you happen to be really short hopefully this doesn’t happen you can take multiple loans of course and uh there is no limit to how many loans you can have and you can pay them back at any time if you have the actual cash for it you can simply choose to pay five and pay off one loan whenever it is you want um you can do it or not do it depending on whatever your needs happen to be at the time and another thing to understand is that one of these tiles let me see where is it right here one of the round markers and it’s going to come out randomly is going to have this word on it income so when you reveal that as soon as you move on to it everyone is who has at least one loan is going to be responsible for paying interest of $1 now you want to be a little careful of this role sometimes people make the mistake of thinking it’s one per loan it’s $1 interest regardless of how many loans you have at the moment the person hits that disc so you have 10 Loans pay one you have one loan pay one you can pay back at any time so like right as the person’s doing if you happen to have $5 lying around you could pay back loans and zero yourself out so you’re not responsible for the interest but basically one payment every time this exact tile is hit all right now let’s get back to uh this card so after you harvest after after you pay food then there’s going to be another symbol just to the right of the food marker this card does not have anything so that means nothing would happen but let me show you an example of what will later on in the game this is the symbol for the town now builds the smallest numbered building at the top of one of these three stacks so you would look at the tops you would look at that top number again that we saw earlier and whichever one was the lowest number the town says Ah you guys are building too slow I’m just going to build it and now the town owns that and the next one is revealed so that’s what that symbol means if you at some point get to this one it’s similar but it’s got like the little anchor symbol in it that means the town will build one of these special buildings with the giant anchor on the back the one that you set six aside earlier and and these are very very very unique the standard buildings you’re using the same 30 cards over and over again this has a starting stack of 36 of which you will only draw six and you’re only actually going to see five of them and for a lot of you who may pick up the expansion there’s going to be another 36 there are a lot of special buildings you can play a lot of games and not see the same one twice so if you get that symbol the town is going to say h I’m going to build the top of the special and then it’s available to use as well so that’s the next thing to look at when you get to these cards and then the final thing is on the very right side let me go back to the card that we’re actually using where did it go here it is so this is the round one card once you’ve processed whether there is a building to be built let me put this back then you would flip it over look at the kind of ship it is and then this is a wind ship that’ll be the first one available and put it in the the proper space so wood iron steel and later in the game what are called luxury ships and you will reveal the next card as a little bit of an aid it will now have a number printed in the very right uh one for both the long and short game telling you just to keep you on track who should have the next turn so this number two means in this game player two should be the one going next which will happen because blue was the last the star player was the last person take a turn green will be the first and the cycle will start again green will place here set out the goods indicated by the tile take his or her turn so on and so forth so those are all the different pieces of the cards and in this way this tracks how you’re progressing throughout the game now that we’ve seen a ship let’s talk about the ship the War faction is the one that lets you build a ship and the cost of the ship is both both printed on the card and it’s actually just printed on the board as well so a wooden ship is going to cost five wood that’s a lot and three energy to boot if you manage to have all of that go on the warf of course don’t forget there might be an entry fee two food uh and build this ship now ships uh they’re very very useful when you build a ship you can just kind of leave it on your side because a ship has no function other than to provide you with goods and the ship is going to provide food for you the owner during the uh sort of the feeding phase at the end of the round depending on the player count so for a three-player game when ship is going to provide three food and you will just kind of keep tabs on that now very important to understand that yes it does provide three food but that’s not giving you three food if you have more coming in through ships then you’re obligated to pay you do not get change so if you have three coming in but you only need to to pay two food your food is covered but you don’t get anything back all right so that’s what a ship will do the other thing a ship will do much later in the game is they can ship goods for money I’ll kind of get to that when we talk about that last building so use Warf build a ship now one thing to point out there’s a little spot here normally you build Wooden Ships nothing additional needed if you ever want to build any iron or higher iron steel or uh luxury but mostly this is going to happen for iron the whoever is using it at the moment they want to build an iron ship has to provide a brick into it which will sit there for the rest of the game so basically sort of like you know first person you got to pay up the brick you got to modernize the thing and then you get to build now keep in mind that is the person using it regardless of who the owner is so your first one to use pays all right so that’s the way a Warf works and let’s see where is M okay all right so those are the things you can do on your turn take everything from one pile and collect it or use a building by putting a disc somewhere including building ships including building buildings uh later on in the game more and more buildings are going to come out and you’re going to start interacting with each other’s buildings a lot more frequently the final thing that can happen on a turn so uh I did mention you can pay off loans is that you can buy and sell buildings and this is not a main action this is an at any time action during your turn and can be assuming you have the money for it can be done any number of times so let’s talk about buying and selling buildings now so far we only looked at constructing constructing requires that you go into a building that says construct a building pay the resources buying a building is very different you can buy either the top building on a stack just the same way you could build or you can buy any building owned by the town now to buy it you would pay the amount of money listed in the corner so you want to buy this building firm pay $4 this can happen at the beginning or after your action you can do it at any time and you would simply take it and put it in front of you it’s now your building and whatever symbols and things are on it you get it now a couple things to to note um buying buildings has a couple advantages if yes it’s true you can use it even if the town owns it but if you buy it if it has a entry fee that is a good reason to buy it if it’s going to be a very popular building you buy it you know your opponents are going to want to use it they’re going to be paying you the entry fee instead of paying the town good that’s one reason to do it a second reason to do it is because at the instant you buy or sell a building the disc that is in it if there is one is removed and given back to the owner so for example let’s say red had taken that action space you really want and so did green and now you don’t want to use this other building that has a prohibitively high cost to build you want to use one of these well before you when it’s your turn before you take your action you can say hey you know what I’m going to pay $6 you get this back I own this building and on my turn I’m going to use that building for free cuz it’s mine so that is something you can do selling is very similar uh you can sell your buildings again at any time on your turn they go back to the town the town will take it however the town only pays half so be careful about that you don’t really want to sell buildings too often CU that value in the top corner is actually part of your end game the end game the victory points is money in this game but if you do sell same thing happens if someone were in it the moment you sell it they go back home and that building becomes immediately available so you can buy any number you can buy from the town you can only sell to the town but you can also buy up here which lends itself to a little bit of fanciness so for example uh it wouldn’t be realistic with the buildings that are out here but just sort of as a conceptual example you could do some really fancy maneuvering you could in theory buy the building off the top for the cash that you had you can then use your action to do a construction action to construct the second one and now that one’s yours and then if the next building were cheap enough you can then use another by cuz buying is buying and selling it’s a free action to buy the next one and Bam you just picked up three buildings all in one shot like I said it’s not realistic with the ones that I actually have here it would be much more practical with extremely cheap buildings but that is something you can do so the timing of it is whenever you want all right so now me put this back to make it a little more realistic all right so now that we’ve covered all of those let’s talk about one final building that um it’s just one of all the 30 but it’s kind of important it it’s the thing that everyone’s going to end up using a lot regardless so we should talk about a little let me see if I can grab this guy where did he wind up come on shipping line oops there you are all right so a big part of your game is going to be this guy which obviously makes this building an important building uh what this thing does is when you go into it it allows you to use whatever ships you own to sell a certain number of goods now when you read these ships it will tell you a wooden ship can ship two tiles uh iron three and steel four each and each time you ship you’re going to have to pay uh energy for it you’re going to have to pay three energy per ship that you want to use and what it basically means is it’s a way of getting rid of your resources if you have really valuable resources so uh don’t ship steal so like for example if you picked up during the course of the game if you picked up a lot of leather there’s a little number in the bottom says 4f that means four Franks and also you’ll see the same number listed on the shipping line so it’ll tell you what everything’s worth so you can do this action to ship off your goods and you will immediately get the money that money is very useful I kind of want to emphasize that whenever you use the shipping line and get a huge influx of money the first thing you need to be thinking of doing is using that money right away so you know pay off your loans so that you can Char you know knock off the interest payment buy the nice buildings that are out so that you know you can get if there are any good ones still out there you can pick them up and you know get those benefits as well so just kind of keep that in the back of your head whenever you get this big shot of money at the end go and buy stuff all right so that’s the shipping line all right now the game is going to go round by round so each round you’re going to do turns you’re going to finish you’re going to flip you may Harvest put out the proper ship people will buy ships over time pay your food you go on and on and on until you get to the very end and on the very final turn everyone’s going to finish up this card is going to flip as well it will always be the same luxury liner in the back and by the way eventually you will not be able to build or buy a ship every time you are not going to be able to keep up just the new one is always just going to stack on top oh and actually very good opportunity to mention one other thing the cost of buying any ship or any building is going to be the number in the upper left corner however a lot of buildings or ships are going to have this additional text down here which is it says cost that basically means if you were to buy it that is the price you would pay and uh you would not sell a ship so uh selling a building is going to be at that numbered price so basically that’s the game’s way of saying well this building has an additional value Beyond so you have to pay a premium over its true value to even pick it up so just uh make sure you note that all right so once the last turn is over and everyone has gone then the last thing you do in the game everyone will get one final unblockable worker disc action so in turn order do one final thing uh you cannot be blocked so if someone’s there you get to just go but you still do have to pay the entry fee if there is one for the building uh just on a side note it is very common that this action for a lot of players is going to be the shipping line that tends to be not always but often uh can’t be blocked the Only Rule is you cannot reuse whatever building you’re in that’s all it is so basically say I want to go here boom pay the person use it that’s like the final act now once you’re done at the end of the game you’re going to count up points points are going to be in the corner for every ship you own every building you own there are going to be some buildings that have text for the endgame so let me see if I can find an example of one so here’s an example of a building that is going to score for itself and then it will say this building is also worth more for every building of these symbols that you may have so just count those appropriately uh the uh money that you have left over at the end of the game will be part of that and then that is pretty much it that is all of the victory points Whoever has the highest score is going to be the winner and this game does not have a tie break so if you’re in your friend’s tied then you’re just going to have to play again so now you guys know how to play laav