Game Review: Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle
Deck Builder, Co-op Play
Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle (HPHB) is a good introduction to deck building games, because of its solid game design, gentle learning curve, and tight integration with its theme. I played it solo this weekend, and here are my impressions.
HPHB starts simple, with characters, locations, villains, low-level spells (“Alohomora!”) and basic items (Butter Beer) from the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. As you progress, you unlock more powerful and experienced versions of your heroes, with commensurately more potent spells, locations, items, allies, and of course, villains from the later Harry Potter books. Just as the characters in the books learn and grow in their magical abilities, and situations/villains become darker and more deadly, so too do the game mechanics and challenge level gradually evolve. It’s a nifty setup that eases novice deck builder players into increasingly more complex strategies for success. There’s a built-in incentive to improve: the anticipation of opening up each sealed box (marked “Game 2,” “Game 3,” etc. — all the way through to “Game 7”) to unlock the cooler, more powerful spells (“Expecto Patronum!”), items and allies to defeat the nastier baddies from the later books. In this regard, HPHB is somewhat similar to “Legacy” games, with later content not to be opened until you have completed earlier levels; you’ll be happy to note that no components have to be permanently defaced in HPHB.
HPHB is a true deck builder, giving players a number of decks to manage and draw from. Each hero has their own starting deck, with certain allies and items unique to that character. For example, Harry starts with his owl, Hedwig, and Hermione starts with her cat familiar, Crookshanks.
By playing cards from their personal deck, players will earn Influence tokens to purchase upgraded spells, items and allies from the Hogwarts Deck. Experienced deck builder players will recognize the Hogwarts Deck as analogous to the Market Row in Hero Realms, or The Trade Row in Star Realms.
There’s the Dark Arts deck, which starts off each player’s turn with negative effects that have to be resolved; and the Villain deck, from which villains are drawn to further oppose our heroes’ progress.
The Location Deck provides a set of locations from the books where each encounter takes place. Villains win by using their Dark Arts powers to accumulate the corresponding number of Villain Control tokens printed on that location card. The Villain Control tokens are nice, substantial metal hexagons with a Dark Mark skull fashioned into them. 1–4 heroes (Harry, Ron, Hermione and Neville) must team up to prevent the villains from controlling locations, by using spells and items to remove Villain Control tokens, and by causing attack damage to the villains. Heroes win by defeating all the villains.
Game flow is straightforward, divided into four phases per player:
1. Dark Arts phase — bad things happen
2. Villain phase — bad things get even worse
3. Player phase — players play cards to acquire Attack (to damage/knock out villains) and Influence tokens (to purchase better spell, item and ally cards)
4. Discard/Draw phase — players discard unused cards and tokens, and draw a fresh set of five cards from their personal deck into their hand.
If a player takes enough damage to lose all their health points, they get stunned. This means they lose half the cards in their hand, rounded down, as well as any Attack and Influence tokens they had when they got stunned. The current location also acquires another Villain Control token. While this is bad, a stunned player regains all health and is ready to resume hostilities on their next turn. This makes the game more forgiving than most other deck builders, and avoids situations where vanquished players have nothing to do except twiddle their thumbs while waiting for the current game to finish, before they can rejoin the fray.
As much as I like HPHB, it’s not perfect. Unlike other deck builders, the base HPHB game provides no method of culling unwanted low-level cards from your personal deck. This clutters your deck and lowers the probability of drawing upgraded cards that you’ve purchased. This issue has reportedly been addressed in the just-released Monster Box of Monsters Expansion, so that purchase most likely lies in my future.
Another minor issue is that less powerful villains from previous game boxes are not removed from the Villain deck as you progress. With an unlucky shuffle of the Villain deck, you could find a sudden lack of challenge against a string of Game 1 starter villains. Fortunately this issue is easily addressed by a house rule to remove overly easy villains from the Villain deck.
Bottom line: Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle is a solid, polished introduction to deck building games that even non-fans of the books and films will enjoy. Co-op play makes it stand out from the current crop of PvP deck builders. Not too hard, although it might be a little too easy for deck builder veterans. Highly recommended.
Pros:
- Game mechanics are well-designed
- Tight integration with Harry Potter theme
- Attractive game board and player boards keep things well organized
Cons:
- No way to purge unwanted low-level cards from personal deck
- In later games, villain deck shuffling randomness could lead to lack of challenge
