Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Hello hello.

I had a birthday recently. My parents got me a gift card to Chapters (and a used scroll saw!). I had to go in to town to pick up a part for our dryer (which now seems to be functioning as required) and to renew my driver's license. So I thought I'd pop in to ye olde Chapters store and see if anything caught my eye.

I went straight for the games table. There was a lot of Risk and Game of Thrones Risk, a few Ticket to Ride boxes, and some other stuff. I was about to turn around when I saw Dominion on sale. I picked it up, looked it over and wondered if I should buy it. Then I remembered having played it on my computer (against the AI) and somewhat enjoying it, but it wasn't an earth-shattering experience. I know it's rated quite high on the BGG, but I had to admit I wasn't all that interested in the game.

Dominion is a deck builder. This means that you, as a player, have a small deck of cards at the start. Some of your cards act as some form of currency that is used to purchase cards from a certain pool. These cards are added to your deck ad you get to use them as the game moves forward. You will go through the deck over and over, buying new cards that either help you buy more and better cards, let you attack an opposing player or defend the opposition's attacks, for example.

Dominion against the computer is not the only deck builder I've played. I've tried a couple of others out that friends own. There's a thematic one called Thunderstone Advance, which is almost a semi-cooperative game in that it's players vs. monsters, but feels more like a race since you can't collectively lose and the game just goes until someone can kill the big baddie. Of course, there may be other ways to play where you can all lose to the monster, but I've only played it with a friend who owns it, so I only know from my experience. I also played 7 Wonders at this friend's place, and that was pretty good, too.

Despite my experiences with these games, I've still kind of been on the fence about how much I really like deck-builders.

As I returned Dominion to its place, I saw Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, a cooperative deck builder. Yes, another deck builder. For some reason it was catching my eye, much more than Dominion ever did. So I whipped out ye olde smart phone and looked up Mr. Potter's game on the BGG webs. It was still rated over 7/10. So I dove in further, looking at a couple of written reviews. One was titled "This might be the co-op deck builder you've been looking for". There was also the likelihood that this game would see a table often enough as a number of people in my life, some of them fellow gamers, are very into Potterverse (is that a thing?). Mostly, though, was the thought that my 8 year-old daughter, who just finished book 3 of the Potter series, would be interested in this game.

I decided to take the chance.

Hogwarts Battle is a straight-on cooperative game with a recognized theme that is well-matched to its mechanics. 2 - 4 players can be Harry, Ron, Hermione, and/or Neville, each with different in-game strengths. You can collectively lose to the game if the Death Eaters take full control of Hogwarts, which is represented by a number of important locations from the book. The interesting bit is that it's kind of like these legacy games that are all the rage these days, where you have stuff that's hidden from you until you beat the game up to a certain point. With Hogwarts Battle, the new stuff is split into books. Book 1 is super easy and the game gets harder as you add more books, but it also gets more interesting as you go and more rules are added.

Today I broke the game open and played Book 1 solo using Harry and Ron. Then I played Book 1 with Jeanette (Ron and Hermione) to see if she'd go for it.

Well, now I am in the middle of playing Book 3 with Jeanette, who really wanted to play Neville this time (I'm Harry). We'll see how we fare tomorrow. I haven't looked at the Book 2 and 3 villain cards or Dark Arts cards, so I don't know who else might be coming or what other tricks there might be to foil us.

Middle of a Book 3 game with my daughter. So far we've defeated Prof. Quirrell, a Dementor, Tom Riddle, and Peter Pettigrew. There's, I think, four more villains to go and they've taken control of the Hogwarts Express. We are now facing what could be a rather difficult father and son duo: Lucius and Draco.

Another cool thing is that I saw pnp files that people have put together for players to take the roles of other characters from the books, like Luna or Ginny.

And a zoomed-out shot to behold the gloriousness of this game on my game table.