by FallJester
I have only played Agricola (~20 games), but I am about to pull the trigger on Le Havre.The only comment I want to add to the discussion is about teaching Agricola. Personally, I think it is a major pain. Even though the theme is really intuitive, it still has taken upwards of 30 min to teach the rules, and just when the noobies are confident that they understand the rules, we deal them 14 cards and they are confused all over again. I find this really impedes the flow of a player's first game.
Even when I play a game, I always hate the buzzkill of everyone silently reading over their cards for the first few minutes. From the reviews, it sounds like Le Havre's "let's start, and you can learn as you go" attitude is better to learn.
I know that the family version of Agricola doesn't use cards, but that seems like oversimplifying the game (especially if we only have 1 or 2 new players in the game).