Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Plays: 4Px2, 2Px3. Played up to Game 3 (of 7).

I have read all the Harry Potter books, and watched all the movies. I'm not a diehard fan, but I do enjoy the stories and the characters. Older daughter Shee Yun is a fan and she is much more familiar with the Harry Potter universe than I am. When I first heard about this game, my first thought was it would be nice to buy a copy to play with her. Unfortunately my regular suppliers didn't stock them. I didn't want to go through the trouble of buying directly from overseas. So, no Harry Potter for me. Recently I discovered that my colleague Zee Zun has a copy of the game. He bought it at shopee.com.my. It was cheap too. I wondered whether it was a pirated version. I examined his copy and found the quality to be good. It looked legitimate. So I soon bought a copy myself. When my copy arrived, I found it to differ slightly from Zee Zun's. Our dice are different. His are in solid colours while mine are semi-transparent. The icons on mine look faded and blurry. My green die is so dark it is almost black. The dice are still functional I guess. Other components are fine. So I guess I have no complaints. I wonder whether I have bought from a different seller on Shopee.

I had thought Shee Yun would be quite excited to play, but I was disappointed. Being a fan of Harry Potter doesn't necessarily mean being a fan of the boardgame. I had to ask her a few times before I was able to convince her to play with me. She did have fun when we played. She is familiar with the characters and spells. She reminded me who did what in which episode.

The Game

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a cooperative deck-building game. You play one of the four Heroes - Harry, Ron, Hermione or Neville. There are villains and bad events in the game. Your job is to defeat all villains. The bad guys want to control the wizarding world, and they do so by capturing a few key locations. If all locations are captured by evil forces before you defeat all villains, you lose.

The board is there only to help you organise where to place your cards. It is not strictly necessary. This is a card game, with some markers to help you keep track of things. The stack at the top left is your locations. Only one is exposed at any one time. Only when it is captured by the evil forces a new one (if any is left) will take its place. The stack to the right of the location cards is the Dark Arts cards - event cards which trigger bad things. Usually you need to draw at least one Dark Arts card every turn. At the lower left you see the villain card. In this game we played, there is only one active villain at any one time. In more advanced games, there will be two and eventually three villains. The six cards on the right are Hogwarts cards - player cards available to be purchased. These are randomly drawn from the draw deck. Whenever a card is purchased from this pool, a new card will be drawn to replenish the pool.

This is a deck-building game and uses the common deck-building rules. When you buy a card, it goes to your discard pile. You don't get to use it yet. The next time your draw deck runs out, you reshuffle your discard pile to form a new draw deck. Only then any recently purchased cards will enter play, becoming part of your draw deck.

On your turn, you must resolve the Dark Arts cards first (i.e. the bad events), and then the villain cards. Only after these are done you get to execute your actions, by playing cards. The two most basic things you get to do are making money and attacking. When you make money, you get to spend it to buy new cards. When you attack, and gain attack tokens and may choose to place them on any active villain. Every villain has a health value. He is defeated when you place enough attack tokens to match his health value. Cards have various other powers, like healing, drawing more cards, giving money or attack tokens to your teammates, and reducing the evil control markers at locations.

The game is divided into 7 levels, called Game 1 to Game 7. This matches the number of books (and movies). Game 1 is simple. Some elements are added or changed in each subsequent game. It is a little like playing a legacy game. However there is no destructive element and no irreversible change. You can reorganise the components into any specific Game number you want. Naturally, Game 7 is the most complete version of the game, and probably also the longest. When you play from Game 1 to Game 7, it is a little like watching the movies all over again. Each game has its own set of locations. Dark Arts cards, villains and Hogwarts cards are added at each game, matching characters and story elements that are introduced in each movie. The player characters also get new abilities as you progress to higher levels.

This is the player board. The main function is to track your health. When your health falls to zero, don't worry, you won't get killed. You are just Stunned. The most severe part of being Stunned is (usually) discarding half your hand. So it is not too bad. Still, you don't want to get Stunned too often. It will make you very inefficient. The two cards on top are the Hero card (character card) and the reference card. This is a Game 1 Hero with no special ability. The Hero card you get in Game 3 onwards has special abilities. That pile on the right is your discard pile. Your draw deck is meant to be on the left.

This is one of the villains. The tiny text at the top right corner specifies this is a Game 1 villain. The villain card tells you the villain's ability and the reward for defeating him. The number at the bottom right is the health value of the villain. The lightning token is an attack token. You need six of them to defeat Professor Quirrell.

Every Hero starts with a unique deck of 10 cards. E.g. Harry has Hedwig. Many of the starting cards are the spell Alohomora, which gives you $1. Technically it's giving you 1 Influence, but I always think of Influence as money because you buy cards with it. Spells are one type of cards. There are also Allies and Items.

The game is like a race, between you defeating all villains and the game system capturing all locations. You need to balance between offense and defense. It's mostly about offense, since not many cards help you defend the locations. You are constantly improving your deck. You need to do this efficiently.

The Play

The first time I played was with Xiaozhu, Edwin and Zee Zun. Xiaozhu and Edwin are Harry Potter fans. Having made plans to play, we brought along our Harry Potter memorabilia. We also played the movie soundtracks during our games.

I brought this chocolate box. This was a gift from Xiaozhu. I have eaten the chocolate and I kept the box as a souvenir. I was delighted to find that there is an Item card in the game called Chocolate Frog, and it looks exactly like this.

I played Game 1 and Game 2 with Xiaozhu, Edwin and Zee Zun. Xiaozhu and Edwin were new to deckbuilding games, and the new mechanism confused Edwin a few times. He placed a newly bought card in the wrong place a few times, sometimes in his hand, sometimes on top of his draw deck. As hobbyists we can easily forget that many game mechanisms we take for granted are actually alien to non-gamers.

The rulebook suggested that players who are already familiar with deck-building games jump straight to Game 3, so I assumed Games 1 and 2 were just tutorials and were easy to beat. To my surprise, we struggled with Game 2, and eventually lost. We lost control of the first two locations quickly, and the third location was a tough one, triggering two Dark Arts events every turn. We suffered badly at the hands of Lucius Malfoy. Whenever a control marker was placed on a location, he healed. We were stuck with him for a long time. He kept healing himself. This was not a training game at all!

Later when I played with Shee Yun, we found Game 2 to be rather easy. We proceeded to Game 3, and beat it easily too. Our defense of the locations was almost perfect. We almost managed to keep them completely free of control markers. I suspected the difference in difficulty was due to the different number of players. So I checked online, and found that indeed many others had the same experience. In two player games, you improve your deck at twice the speed of four player games. You wait for only one other player before your turn comes again, instead of three other players.

Compared to other deck-building games, this one is simple. At least that's what I see so far up to Game 3. I have read the rules up to Game 7 and there aren't many additional rules coming. It is only the cards I have not seen. This level of complexity makes the game workable for non-gamers. From Game 3 onwards, the game starts to get long. I think it took about an hour to finish my Game 3. As you progress, more and more villains are added, so naturally it takes more effort to defeat them all. However the Heroes become stronger too and should be more effective at defeating villains.

A big part of the game is the shopping experience. You need to make purchases wisely. Some cards create synergy, so you should make use of that. Sometimes you want to assign certain players to focus on buying certain types of cards. That helps you increase the likelihood of having synergy. From Game 3 onwards, Heroes get special abilities, and that's even more reason to specialise and to buy cards purposefully. Most cards either help you make more money or fight better. Money helps you further improve your deck, but fighting is what you ultimately need to do to win. This is similar to Dominion. You want to make good money to improve yourself, but ultimately you need to score points. You need to know when to switch. Sometimes there is a clear turning point, but not always. In Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, what cards are available in the pool is random, so you need to react to the situation as well.

Compared to buying cards, using cards is often straightforward. Many cards can be used only in one way anyway. Some do give you options, but often the right choice is obvious. Similar to Dominion, this game is not so much about what to do with cards you draw. It is more about how to improve the odds of drawing good hands in the first place. Thus the importance of your shopping strategy.

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley came up at the same time in one of our games, so of course that was a photo moment. They cost $6, which is not cheap. Normally you won't be able to afford them in the early game. Their card type is Ally - notice the blue bar and keyword Ally.

The Malfoy father and son came up together too. This is a scary combo because both of them are triggered by a control marker being added to a location. Thankfully when Shee Yun and I were fighting them, there weren't many control markers added. We were lucky.

The Thoughts

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a simple deck-building game. Play it for the Harry Potter theme, and not for it being a deck-builder. I'm sure that's the intention of the publisher. They are selling the Harry Potter world and not the deck-building game. The underlying game mechanism just needs to work. It doesn't need to be very good. To me it is good enough. I also think it is appropriate because this game targets the mainstream market. It wouldn't be wise to have too complex a game mechanism. In fact the deck-building mechanism already presents some challenge to non-gamers.

Just beware that the 2-player game can be too easy. I think it is best to apply the variant rules suggested by the rulebook to make it more challenging. There are also variants suggested by players at BGG.