Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle First Impressions (Spoiler Free)
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a co-op deck-building game.
Wingardium Leviosa and all that.
The forces of evil are threatening to overrun Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, a cooperative deck-building game, and it’s up to four students to ensure the safety of the school by defeating villains and consolidating their defences.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle Game Play
Each player gets a character. Either Harry, Ron, Neville or Hermione comes with its own player board. It also comes with its own unique deck of cards which is nice.
I went with Hermione who had a deck containing Crookshanks, a cat which made me happy. (Apparently, it’s also half Kneazle?)
The game is played over 4 steps:
Step 1 is to reveal a Dark Art s event card. These have several negative effects that usually target the active player. Damage, Discard a Card, and things like that.
Step 2 is Resolve Villain’s Ability. These are characters such as Draco Malfoy and Quinius Quirrell that either has an ability that activates each round or an ability that is triggered when a certain thing happens.
At this point, I should say the game is a scenario based and I played the first one. Things will change around as the scenarios progress. They all come in their own little boxes which is cute 🙂
Back to the game and Step 3, this is the players’ turn.
Player Turn
It’s pretty standard. You have a starting deck of cards, some of which give you money to buy stuff and some that deal damage.
You can play as many cards as you like. Using the money (Influence) to buy cards from a selection available and using damage to wound the revealed Villain.
It’s a pretty standard deck builder in this way with cards allowing you to draw more cards and manipulate play. Cards are not only Spells (Red) and Items (Yellow) as pictured but you also have characters.
I saw Dumbledore and Hagrid for example as characters you can add to your deck. These seemed to be more expensive than other cards but also more powerful.
There are cards available that you play to help every player. It is a co-op after all.
Step 4 is the tidy-up phase which starts by checking the Location. The Dark Arts cards in Step 1 can add tokens to a Location card that is in play.
If it’s full of tokens it’s moved aside to a new Location laid out. Then you check to see if you’ve wounded the Villain enough. If so, gain the reward and reveal the next one. Then the next player takes their turn.
This continues until all the Villains are defeated and if that happens, the players win.
If all the Locations are filled with tokens you lose. Try that scenario again!
Theme
It has all the Harry Potter. I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan and I don’t know much about it at all. I’ve seen each film once and thought they were OK.
So I know THINGS, I just don’t know the details. Having images from the films in the game helps a lot with that.
I don’t know how the game relates to the films though. You do things with Harry Potter stuff but it’s not like you’re following any particular film or book. (As far as I know)
Setup
This seems fairly simple. Shuffle up the core deck, and give each player their board and unique deck, and almost done.
There is a bit to do on the board but not much.
I don’t know how separating things in the different scenario packs hinders setup time? I’m not sure if things are combined or split out… Still, can’t be that hard.
Components & Artwork
I don’t remember what the cards felt like. I know I didn’t feel uneasy about playing with them un-sleeved. But, as it’s a deck builder I would really like to see these cards sleeved.
The rest of the stuff is OK.
The non-film screenshot artwork is actually pretty good. The spells have directions to wave your wand to cast them which was fun to do with my finger. No idea if they line up with the films and books but they work for me.
Ease of Teaching & Accessibility
I’ve taught 80-90% of the rules above so teaching is easy. If you know how to play deck builders this will take no effort to learn at all.
It is also very accessible. It’s not too difficult and as it’s a co-op you can easily lay out your hand each turn and get help playing the cards.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle Summary
So, deck builders, I love them. My current fave is Legendary Encounters: Firefly followed closely by Hero Realms.
This one is pretty cool. It plays very smoothly and the scenario packs are interesting. I haven’t seen them but
The only thing is the theme. I’m not a fan and it’s not something I can get into having no connection to it.
This system with a different theme would be good. USAopoly is doing a Toy Story version which is cool but again it’s not a theme I know too well.
They do get licences for a lot of IPs so I’ll be waiting for a version that works for me.
Jesta ThaRogue
