Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle

Opinions about Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (Board game)

This is a legacy style game, so below the line are going to be some spoilers. Don't read if that matters to you. If you want to know my overall opinion, I'd recommend it, though I have some minor complaints that I wanted to talk about.

All of the details below are minor, niggling details. Overall, the game was a ton of fun to play with friends. Get a group who is going to be willing to marathon it over 8ish hours or maybe a book per night over the course of a week. The idea of the game is a campaign, so you'll want a consistent group. For the price, the game was wonderful ($40 USD, as of writing this).

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As I said, HPHB was a good game. Skybilz and Daniplayerone and I played it over the course of probably 3 nights in the week leading up to AGDQ and then finished it the day after we returned. Definitely would recommend it, but I feel like there were a lot of things that kept this game from being as good as it could have been.

1) For a deckbuilding game, there didn't seem to be much structure to the cards you put in your deck. Some were good and some were bad, but you only got to see a random 6 cards from a deck that grew to be at least 100 cards, but usually only a few of them were worth picking up at any given time. The cards that were good were often really overpowered. The cards that were bad were often not worth the cardstock they were printed on. Maybe the rules included something we missed about clearing out the Hogwarts cards. I know a lot of deckbuilders of this variety include something like this, such as paying 2 influence to discard all 6 Hogwarts cards and get 6 new ones.

2) The villains came across as a nuisance more than an obstacle. The goal of the game is to defeat all the villains before they take over the locations, but only in a few rare circumstances did the villains even manage to successfully overtake the first location. Combine that with the fact that each book included more villains rather than replacing them. Imagine how much better book 3 would have been if the deck had been a smaller number of more powerful, dangerous villains (like maybe 4 dementors, Barty Crouch Jr., and Peter Pettigrew) rather than just the same villains over and over again ("oh, Quirrell is in this one too? I thought he was dead in book 1").

Maybe we had an easier time with this because we were playing smarter. We had divided up "duties" between the three of us, since most of the bonuses were awarded for playing more of a single type of card rather than diversifying your deck (another shortcoming of the game, imo, because it encourages a lot of cross-talk and meta-gaming, which I think is a problem for themed games. Too much talk about game mechanics and deck composition rather than talking about Harry Potter is a problem)

3) The horcruxes in book 7 act as an additional villain, and it works somewhat nicely (though I think if they hadn't reused the (at this point) giant stack of villains, the horcruxes would have worked better as the book 7 villains, ending with Voldemort), but the bonuses they give you for defeating them breaks them entirely. They can only be defeated with the dice, which forces you to use the dice if you weren't before, but each time you defeat one, it lets you use the dice more, which makes future horcruxes easier, not harder. Seriously, huge oversight.

4) Not including characters skills from book 1 made it a total gamble which character skills you get in books 3 and 6(?), which seems like a silly oversight. I picked Harry because why not, but that later made me have to have a certain set of character-specific skills I didn't choose? I could change characters, I suppose, but that is a band-aid for the problem. If the idea is that its a campaign with a theme, I shouldn't be changing characters a bunch. The proficiency cards in book 5 seemed shoehorned in to maybe address this, but your hand was slightly forced with these too, because of course you're going to pick the proficiency that best compliments your character-specific skills.

5) The game needed to be harder. I know I already said this, but it needs to be said. This needs to be points #5-#10. They offered options for making the game harder, but they mostly seemed like they wouldn't have had much of an impact. Maybe villain cards could have had easy-mode abilities and hard-mode abilities. Maybe more Dark Arts events cards. Maybe the location trackers could have been shorter. Or everytime it said add 1 tracker, add 2 instead. Anything. We didn't lose a single book. We barely struggled outside of maybe book 3, but that was before they introduced a lot of overpowered cards.