Le Havre: The Inland Port

The game is inflated beyond the edges of the screen! I can’t see whole chunks of the interface, including how many coins I have. This makes the game unplayable and I have found no way to adjust this in the settings. Perhaps this is because I’m playing it on iphone rather than ipad, but they shouldn’t sell an iphone version then.

The game will be easy to pick up if you’ve played the normal boardgame or even any of Uwe Rosenberg’s other games. I handily beat the AI on my first game at highest level, but the full featured app that was made a few years ago is somewhat harder (but pretty easy compared to a irl game with a novice). Not bragging, just saying this is very light even compared to the lighter eponymous boxed version, good for learning the main game perhaps. Euro fans might not be too thrilled.

I really like this game and overall it is a very nice port. But there are some quibbles that keep me from giving it a perfect score. The biggest issue is that there is no "undo". There's absolutely no reason why there can't be an undo before you end your turn. Sometimes you make a mistake and overpay or accidentally sell a building when trying to scroll (another issue in and of itself—scrolling to see all the building is difficult to do without dragging buildings around). Regardless, undo would be really helpful. Another problem is notifications. I'm not getting any and neither is the person I'm trying to play. That makes async games tricky. There is also no way to save games against the AI. Leave the screen and your progress is lost. This also seems like a big oversight. Finally, there's a bug in the sound where sometimes even if you have music disabled, it comes back on and you have to enable and disable it again. I would love to see stats included for casual games. They can be separate from the ELO system, but would still be useful. I will play most of my games against friends. Address these issues and you have a 5 star app.