Harry Potter Deck Building Game: Hogwarts Battle Review

Raise your wands high into the sky, with Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, the board game that lets you play as a Hogwarts student through seven years at the famous school of Witchcraft and Wizardry – collecting allies, learning new spells, and fighting evil.

What is Hogwarts Battle Board Game?

Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle Board Game (sometimes referred to as just “Hogwarts Battle”), is a deckbuilding game. You’ll take on the role of a member of the Golden Trio – Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, or Hermione Granger – or as Neville Longbottom – and will work to develop your skills over the course of the game. This game is cooperative, where you’re all working together to achieve the same goal. You and your fellow players will try to defeat the Death Eaters threatening the wizarding world, fighting for control of visiting various locations and defeating villains to secure the castle from the forces of evil.

It’s sometimes called the Hogwarts Battle Card Game, because of the deck building element. That’s a game style which means you buy cards within the game that you add to your own hand. As the game progresses, the choices you make on which card you want, combined with those you already have, means that you craft your own personal deck. That means that you can buy cards based on how you like to play, for example, using more spells, or preferring to heal – but, you never know which cards will be revealed, so you may have to make some tough choices.

Its age recommendation of 11+ is too high in my opinion as it is about the best possible way for younger kids to learn deckbuilding. We recommend this game for 8 year olds, which happens to also be an excellent time to start reading the books. Playing the game will definitely enhance that experience – giving them additional depth of experience with the Wizarding World – and I especially recommend reading the books together and playing the game together as you go. If you grew up on these books, it’s a very satisfying parenting experience, one of the best you’ll find, actually.

The game itself was made in 2016, after the main story had concluded, but before the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – so it focuses entirely on the universe of the Seven original books. It was designed by Sean Fletcher (who also designed Disney’s Sorcerer’s Arena board game), Forrest-Pruzan Creative (the studio who were later acquired by Funko Games), Kami Mandell (Harry Potter House Cup), and Andrew Wolf (Death Eater’s Rising and more).

How to Play Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle

When you first open Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, you’ll find not only tokens, game boards, and instructions, but also seven boxes marked from Game 1 to Game 7, which represent each school year. So the first time you play each scenario, you’ll have the excitement of uncovering new cards and new challenge. Additionally, the game includes four Hogwarts house dice as part of the components.

Set up of Hogwarts Battle only takes a few minutes, and the game teaches you how to play as you go.

Inside the first box are the starting cards, and you’ll need to choose which character you want to play as. Each have different skills, for example, Harry Potter is an all rounder, who has Hedwig to accompany him, and he is a good supporting character, whereas Neville specializes in healing, alongside his frog Trevor. Hermione is better at spells, accompanied by Crookshanks, whereas Ron is more brash, and better at attacking, as long as he has allies.

You’ll then need to shuffle the Dark Arts cards, and the Villain cards, and put them on the board in the allocated spaces for them. Reveal one of each for the first round. The former is something negative that happens, often reducing your health. The latter is who you’ll be trying to defeat. You’ll need to defeat all the villains in the pile, in order to win the game.

In the first game, you face only one villain at a time, but as the game continues, this may change…

Place the location cards down in order. Take your individual game board and put your heart marker on full health. You’ll then take the Hogwarts deck (which contain your items, allies, and spells you can add to your deck over the course of the game) and place six face up on the right of the board, in the marketplace area. You can buy from these later. Place the tokens off the board, but in reach.

Draw five cards from your own deck as your starting hand, and you’re ready to begin!

Knowing where to place your cards is straightforward, as the board has sections to remind you

There are five things to do each turn:

• Draw a Dark Arts card: You’ll know how many to draw, because the Location Card will tell you. These cards have negative effects – they may take away health, or even put a Villain Control token on the location. If all the slots of Villain Control fill up, you’ve lost control of the location! Losing control of locations can increase the number of Dark Arts you reveal each turn and if you lose control of all the locations, you lose…

• Activate Any Villain Effects: Look at the Villain card or cards in play, and, if there are special actions, follow what the card says. These vary with different villains.

• Play the cards from your hand: From your hand, pick the cards you want to play. These will let you pick up damage tokens to use on Villains, influence tokens to buy more cards from the marketplace, or similar. You can play as many of these as you like, and they go into your discard pile.

• Use your resources to attack and buy new cards: Resources you haven’t used by the next turn are lost, so play them straight away! You can put damage tokens on a Villain if you have them, and if the damage tokens exceed their health score, they are defeated. You might also use your influence to buy new cards. Once purchased, these go into your discard pile, ready to come out the next time you shuffle your deck.

• Reset: Discard any leftover tokens, check if the villains now control a location and if so, discard it, refill the Hogwarts cards in the marketplace, discard any cards left in your hand, and draw five more. Play then passes to the next player and they begin by drawing a Dark Arts Card.

Hedwig to the rescue – she could help us to attack the villains, or to regain the health we’ve lost!

Once you’ve defeated the Villains you’ve won that game. You can continue to play that scenario as many times as you like, but when you are ready, crack open the “Year Two” box, to add additional complexity and a greater challenge.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle Review

The big question of any review is whether you should play it, and in this instance, you absolutely should. A fun deck building game in a beloved franchise will always be a winner, but here are some more reasons to pop to Diagon Alley for your own copy: the game offers progressively more challenging adventures, providing increasing difficulty and unlocking new secrets as you save Hogwarts.

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a Deck Building Game (that teaches you how to play deck building games)

Deck Building is a very popular mechanic found in many strategy games. The appeal is that, even though all players start with similar decks of cards, over the course of the game you can build something customized to your strategy, creating something truly unique each game. Each player has their own personal deck, which is used to acquire resources, iconic characters, spells, and magical items. Because different cards will be available in the marketplace each play, you’ll never create the same deck twice.

Is Hagrid worth his four cost? Only you know your deck well enough!

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle isn’t just a great deck building game, but also a great introduction to deck building games given its seven different levels of increasing complexity. Not only does the game get slightly more challenging on each level, it slowly introduces all of the mechanics in the game in bite sized pieces making it the perfect introduction for family members new to the genre.

It’s a great mechanic because players are in control of their own actions with which cards they chose to buy, and there’s great decisions to make on every turn, balancing the long-term strategy of deck building, with the immediate tactical demands of the board state. It’s satisfying knowing you’ve created a great deck from the choices you had and these games have a great feeling of progression as you become more and more powerful over the course of the game.

A great Cooperative game

The majority of games are competitive, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it is my opinion that kids and families should be playing more cooperative games. The lessons they learn and the joy of sharing in the thrill of victory and agony of defeat, is such a rewarding experience.

In games like ‘Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle’, players battle a cooperative deck, taking on the role of Hogwarts students working together to defend the wizarding world from evil forces. This setup evens out the playing field since you are all working together. Not really an issue if you help your kids along a bit, since you are all playing open handed and working toward the same goal – whereas, in a competitive game, playing that way can really ruin the experience for everyone involved.

Choosing cooperative games is also a great strategy if you have some sore losers (adults included). Not that you can’t lose – this game gets pretty tough as you progress – but because that negative energy isn’t directed at the people sitting around the table.

The strong Harry Potter theme

This game is all about the theme. The cards make sense to the characters who play them, the locations are specific to the book you are working through. As you combine different cards and make different choices you get to tell new stories within the world of Harry Potter.

This is a huge plus in my book, but if you hate Harry Potter, I’d probably look elsewhere. There is a version of this game that is themed around Toy Story, which might be worth a look if that theme is more appealing to you or your kids.

I like both themes, but I lean heavily toward the Harry Potter version, mostly because there is more in the base box AND there are two expansions, with a lot more content to explore, which tips the scales significantly, in my opinion.

Hogwarts Battle Expansions and Versions

Are you ready to try your hand at Charms and Potions? Dare you take on the Monsters?

The fun doesn’t have to stop either, as not only can you easily replay the game (as your deck and experience will never be the same twice), but you can also pick up expansions for the game. The game features seven successive game adventures, each offering increasing difficulty, unlocking new abilities and secrets, and providing a central gameplay experience as players progress through the challenges to save Hogwarts.

Charms and Potions

If you find the upper levels of the base game challenging, then the first one you should pick up is Charms and Potions, which doesn’t increase the difficulty level and might even make things a little easier. It’s designed for up to four students to ensure the safety of the school by defeating villains and consolidating their defenses. It gives you the ability to play with five players and comes with cards for Ginny Weasley, and introduces the ability to learn charms and utilize potions within your deck.

Monster Box of Monsters

The Monster Box on the other hand does increase the difficulty and can be more challenging than anything the base game has to offer. It comes with cards to play as Luna Lovegood and puts you up against a horde of magical creatures. Players must enhance their abilities and unlock new secrets to defend the wizarding world from these evil forces. It adds the Patronuses to the game, as well as a mechanic that puts negative cards in your deck (detentions), which is, in part, what ups the difficulty.

Accessories – Card Sleeves and Play Mat

Card Sleeves

In a deck building game there is lots of shuffling that wears down your cards over time. Because I want to keep the game in good shape so I can play through it with my youngest when he’s old enough, I’ve invested in cards sleeves. I like the official ones from USAopoly, which are quality sleeves with the official game artwork on the back. They also have sleeves for the other cards with different shapes. Those are less essential, but, again, useful since you’ll need to shuffle them a bunch as well.

Not necessary, but nice to have. If you have the expansions, you’ll want to grab two packs to get everything sleeved.

Game Mat

There’s no question that game mats make any card game better and the official one for this game is certainly very nice. If you don’t have a game mat, buy one that’s as big your table; best investment you can make as a tabletop gamer.

That said, this isn’t an essential buy and easy to skip unless you are a true completionist, but it will enhance the experience, which might be worth it, especially since this is a game you could spend hours and hours playing.

Harry Potter: Defense Against the Dark Arts

Defense Against the Dark Arts is a standalone game, which uses similar deck building mechanics but is, instead, a competitive dueling game. Players take on the role of Hogwarts students, utilizing their own personal decks of cards to acquire resources and iconic characters, spells, and magical items to secure Hogwarts castle from the forces of evil. You’ll work through four new game boxes, themed around Professor Dumbledore’s “practical” Defense lessons to combat the rise in dark activity. Depending on the interests of your kids, could be a preferable style or possibly a good next step up in intensity from the original game.

Also Read: Harry Potter Board Games

Final Verdict

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a must-have for fans of both the Harry Potter universe and deck-building games. Hogwarts Battle: A Cooperative Deck-Building Game allows players to take on the role of Hogwarts students, each with their own deck of cards, working together to defend the wizarding world and the castle from evil forces. Its cooperative gameplay makes it accessible and enjoyable for families, offering both a compelling challenge and the joy of working together to achieve a common goal.

The thematic integration is excellent, immersing players in the world of Hogwarts with carefully designed cards and mechanics.

The expansions add significant value, providing additional content and increasing replayability. While optional accessories like card sleeves and game mats enhance the experience, the core game itself offers plenty of depth and entertainment.

Whether you’re a die-hard Harry Potter fan or simply looking for an engaging cooperative game, Hogwarts Battle is a magical addition to any game collection.

Where to buy Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle?

You can find Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle through our Amazon link below , and in your local game stores.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)