Harry Potter Games

The Big Battle

Before we really understood what hobby board gaming was, there were two games for us: Pandemic and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. This game was one of the first steps we took towards gaming, our first deckbuilder, and is still one we treasure and play with a fair amount of regularity.

Part of the charm (no pun intended) of Hogwarts Battle is how is introduces new cards, abilities, and mechanisms to you as you play. Lifting the lid for the first time, you’re greeted with seven different boxes, representing the heroes’ journey through each of the books. As you progress, the villains become trickier to defeat and have more punishing powers. But you’re also rewarded with the opportunity to claim stronger cards and use new spells and abilities at the same time.

The premise of the game is pretty straightforward – work with the other fledgling Hogwarts students to defeat villains using the magic and trickery that you learn at Hogwarts. Each play starts with a deck of 10 cards, five of which are identical spells across all players, and five which are unique to each hero. Each character sheet has an asymmetric power that upgrades at a couple of points as you open new boxes of content. This leans into the theme really well, as your character starts by only knowing the Alohomora spell at the beginning, but learns to cast their Patronus Charm, enlists allies and acquires magical items.

Turns have a simple enough structure, with the villains striking first each time before you have a chance to fight back. You uncover a Dark Arts card which impacts one or more of the heroes in the game, before you resolve the abilities of any villains in play. At the start you’re fighting them one at a time, but as you unlock more content, you have to contend with multiple malevolent miscreants at once. If you let the villains gain too much of an upper hand, you end up on the back foot, revealing more Dark Arts cards each turn, making it harder (but not impossible) to emerge victorious.

You fight back by playing your hand of five cards, possibly earning hearts to regenerate your character’s health, Ministry of Magic tokens to spend on new cards in the shop, or all-important lightning bolts to attack the villains, remove them from play and gain a one-off bonus.

As you move through each of the boxes, you can feel it getting trickier, but it’s balanced well enough that neither side feels too overpowered. There’s a huge sense of progression, and new allies and equipment that mirror the books become available as you go, but beware, as increasingly sinister scoundrels aren’t far behind.

I played this through once at two players, but then started over as my daughter read the books, getting to experience it all over again. It’s one of our most played games, and was a real gateway into deckbuilding, which is a firm favourite for us. But what’s that lurking in the shadows…?

Monsters!

Hogwarts Battle also began our foray into the world of expansions too, starting with The Monster Box of Monsters which sees creatures like the Basilisk join Voldemort and his cronies as they bid to take over the school. In a similar way to the base game, The Monster Box of Monsters also has boxed content, spread over four increasing difficulties. Crucially, there’s another fiendish element working against you now, in the form of Horcruxes you have to find and destroy.

This feels immediately more challenging, with each hero taking hits from Dark Arts cards, the Horcrux cards and the villains. In fact, after playing once and getting swiftly annihilated, it went back on the shelf for a good while before we decided to play again.

The difficulty can be managed – you’re likely fairly experienced players by the time you’ve opened this box. But tackling the Horcruxes feels more reliant on luck than good cooperative play, and regardless of how well you do against the villains, you can’t defeat He Who Must Not Be Named without completing all the tasks on the Horcrux cards. These usually rely on dice rolls, which you can’t do without acquiring allies who grant you that power. And there’s no guarantee they’re going to appear any time soon.

If you want a step up in difficulty, this is for you. If you want something that feels a little friendlier, you might want to visit Professors Snape and Flitwick…

Potent Potions

Charms and Potions is the second expansion for Hogwarts Battle and increases the player count to five with the introduction of Ginny Weasley. The Monster Book of Monsters allows you to play as Luna Lovegood, but at the expense of one of the original four characters.

Charms and Potions adds some neat additional asymmetry, allowing each player to have a particular charm or potion attached to their player board. What’s great about these is that the benefit of that additional bit of magic also varies depending on the health of your character, with typically stronger bonuses being available the more health your character has.

It introduces some difference in how you play, as taking one extra heart benefit, or one more point of damage can have a big impact on your power for that round, potentially leading to you sharing the good and bad out differently amongst your fellow players.

This definitely feels like a kinder expansion, but still ramps up as you complete particular scenarios, but you feel like there’s more on your side, and there’s fewer elements of luck as well.