Le Havre – The Industrious Squirrel

Le Havre single player demo video

At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve created a video of a single player game of Le Havre where I am using the shipping strategy.

I made this video to demonstrate how to get a score near 400 without using special buildings. On boardgamegeek.com people discuss and debate the expected scores for a single player game. Players have posted demo games before, but only as saves from a computer implementation. Mine will be the first video.

After making Le Havre, one of the pleasant surprises was how much fun the single player game is. I’ve played a lot of games and improved my score quite a bit. Before computerizing the game, I played the single player version on the physical board once. But the setup/tear-down and piece twiddling was just too much for a solo game.

I also made this video to draw attention to the touch table implementation. I’d like for other players to ask the publisher for permission to release my version. I’d also like to make boardgamegeek players more aware of gaming on the touch table.

LeHavre – Complete

My touch table conversion of Le Havre is complete. I am sure there are a few more bugs out there, and there might even be some enhancements I decide to add, but we have played several games and it is working well. We have particularly enjoyed the single player game. With one player, the game becomes an optimization puzzle since other players can’t disrupt your plans.

Unfortunately the owners of Le Havre (lookout-games), aren’t willing to give me permission to distribute the game. I had hoped that they would since there is already a free Java version available online. But it sounds like they may have given an exclusive electronic license to someone else.

Read on for a comparison of this project to some of our other games and a bit of a postmortem.

Continue reading “LeHavre – Complete”

Le Havre – Week 3

With a total of 120 hours of work, I am happy to say that Le Havre is playable. There is still a lot of testing, bug fixing, and polish to do; but I’ve played through a full game.

Main progress this week:

All the building actions for the normal and special buildings
End game

I am still expecting another 40 hours or so of work on this game. I’d like to have quite a few more sound effects and player prompts and some better animation for resources being paid/received. And once beta testing starts, I’ll have usability improvements to make too.

Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 3”

Le Havre – Week 2

I have put another 40 hours of work into the touch table conversion of Le Havre, so it is time for an update. In the first week, I did a lot of work with the graphics and layout of the game to make sure that the game would fit onto one screen. In the second week, I have been making the game play.

Here are the progress highlights:

Created graphics for player areas, offers, supply tiles and added animation of buildings and resources.
Incorporated the timeline engine and added save/load and undo to the engine.
Built the main menu: players can join, choose their color, pick options and start the game.
Player area replication code.
Added the “take offer”, “end turn”, “end round”, “buy building”, “repay loan” moves.
Added the scoreboard and scoring logic (except end game bonuses).
Created “feed workers” and “pay interest” dialogs.

The big things left to do are: all the buildings, end game. I feel like I am about half done with this project. We will see how accurate that estimate is. When estimating for a client, I always double my gut feel (and that is usually still too short). So I probably have another 3-5 weeks of work to go.

Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 2”

Le Havre – Week 1

I’ve spent about 40 hours working on Le Havre. About half of that time has been spent planning screen layouts and designing graphics for the buildings and ships. Bill came up with the idea to draw all the buildings (even the ones built by the players) in the center area. This keeps the player areas very small and leaves almost all of the screen space for the “town”.

Even with that idea, the space is still quite tight. I’ve had to create a different view of the buildings and ships for each “mode” that they are going to be displayed in to limit their size.

My main accomplishment this week has been coming up with a screen layout that will be able to display everything that the players need to see, and a design of the ships and buildings that will fit into that layout. I am now fairly confident that it will be possible to play this game on the touch table.

Here is the basic layout: Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 1”

Le Havre – Intro

I have started writing a new touch table game based on the board game Le Havre. Le Harve meets a lot of the criteria that I have for converting a board game. It has a long setup time and a lot of pieces are moved around during the game. It doesn’t have any hidden information and has remained popular with our gaming group for several years. It has a single player mode and plays up to five people.

There are two issues with Le Harve that might make it difficult. One is the amount of stuff that needs to be displayed on the screen: During the game, players build quite a few buildings and ships and all of those need to be on the screen. But it is also possible that they wont built anything, so the “building proposal” area also needs to be able to hold all the buildings. The other issue is that there are quite a few buildings that have special rules. In the base game, I count 18 buildings that will need some special code.

I don’t expect to be able to get rights to sell this game. Le Havre is very popular (currently #11) and the amount of money that we could offer wouldn’t be significant to the creator of the board game. However, there is a Java implementation available online already, so I hope to be able to give away the game.

To get a feel for the time involved in making a board game conversion, I am going to make a blog post for every 40 hours that I spend on the game. I’ll describe what I’ve done during that week and the current state of the game.