Hello everyone!
Today I want to share a game I love particularly, being a Potter fan myself: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle.
Game Overview
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a 2016 release for 2–4 players, ages 11+, with a playtime of 30 to 60 minutes. It was designed by Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Kami Mandell and Andrew Wolf, illustrated by Joe Van Wetering, and published by The Op Games. It won the 2016 Mensa Select award.
Theme
In Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle you play as Harry, Hermione, Ron or Neville, fighting off the dark arts to protect Hogwarts. The game takes you through the seven years of the Wizarding School, with new rules and components unlocking as you progress, just like Harry’s own journey.
How to Win
It’s a race against the dark arts. You win if you manage to defeat every villain before Hogwarts falls, you lose if all of the school’s locations end up under villain control first. Every time you take enough damage, or run into an unlucky Dark Arts event, the villains tighten their grip a little more, so time is never really on your side.
Setup & Components
The box is illustrated to look like a suitcase, and it’s a real highlight. Open it up and the first thing you see is the back of the main board, it’s gorgeous, and that first look genuinely feels like opening a real Hogwarts student’s suitcase. Lift the board out and everything underneath is compact and well organised, with dividers that keep the cards tidy and quick to set up, and each year’s material in its own labelled box so nothing gets mixed up. I wish more of my games were designed with this kind of thoughtful storage.
Component quality is excellent throughout. The villain control tokens are metal, heavy and genuinely satisfying to handle. The health, influence and attack tokens are cardboard and nicely produced. The cards themselves are good quality too, but even so, I sleeve them, I sleeve all of my deck builders because of the constant shuffling, and Hogwarts Battle is no exception.
The front of the board is simple and well organised, and the illustrations, on the cards themselves, are pulled straight from the movies, so if you’ve watched them all, there’s a real sense of familiarity and connection playing through it.
Both expansions I own, the Monster Box and the Charms and Potions Expansion, follow the same suitcase-style illustrated box, so they display beautifully alongside the base game. I’ll cover those in their own reviews another time.
Setup is quick, in line with most deck builders. The main board has designated spaces for everything: the River of cards, events, locations, villains, and the extra components you unlock as the years go on.
Gameplay
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a fully cooperative deck builder, played over turns. Each turn follows the same basic rhythm:
- Draw 5 cards from your deck.
- Resolve Dark Arts events, one at a time, in order, as shown on the active location card. Some affect only you, others hit every player.
- Resolve the villains on display, left to right. Some effects only trigger when you purchase a card, so timing matters.
- Play your cards and buy, using influence, attack tokens, healing, and card draw from your hand to purchase new cards from the display and assign attack tokens to villains. Defeat a villain and resolve its bonus, then discard it, you don’t draw a replacement yet.
- Refill and pass, restocking the villain and card displays, then drawing 5 new cards for your next turn. Purchased cards go to your discard pile, and if your deck ever runs out, shuffle your discard into a fresh one.
For example, if your hand gives you 3 influence, you could use it to buy a stronger card from the display, one that might give you more influence or attack in future turns, gradually making your deck more powerful.
If your health hits 0 at any point, you discard half your cards, though your health resets to full at the end of the turn. Watch out, some Dark Arts events can knock you out even during other players’ turns.
New rules and components are introduced gradually as you move through the years, always tied thematically to what’s happening in the story, so they never feel bolted on.
Solo Mode
There’s no official solo mode in the box, it’s built for 2 to 4 players. But because it’s a fully cooperative game with completely shared information, it plays very naturally solo by controlling two characters yourself (or more, if you’re feeling confident!). I’ve played it this way many times and it holds up really well.
My Experience
I’ve played this game so many times I’ve genuinely lost count, at 2 players, 4 players, and solo. Two players is my favourite configuration, though I suspect that’s personal preference more than anything objective.
I completed the full 7-year campaign at 2 players, including the Monster Box expansion. Solo, I’m currently stuck at year 4, and I’ve already lost miserably once there. At 4 players, honestly, I don’t even remember which year we reached!
Year 4 is where things ramp up, since that’s when Voldemort returns in the books too, and he is, without question, a pain in the ass. For me, one villain effect that stands out is Lucius Malfoy: every time a villain control token is added to a location, all villains lose an attack token from their pool, making them much harder to beat and turning him into a priority target you need to remove fast.
One strategy that worked really well for us at 2 players: prepare all the villains in advance, leaving each one, at most, one attack token short of being defeated. That way, once you’re ready, you can clear the whole display (up to 3 villains from years 4 to 7) in one go.
Not everything about the game is perfect. I’d have loved a trashing mechanism to properly thin weak cards from your deck, I believe this gets added in one of the expansions, the Monster Box if my memory serves. I also wish there were a way to carry some progress between years. Since each year starts you fresh with the same basic deck, a rough villain draw early on can leave you feeling crushed before you’ve had a real chance to fight back.
My Rating
Rate: 7/10
I love the theme and I genuinely love this game, but those rough edges, no deck thinning, no carry-over progression, and the sometimes brutal luck of the villain draw, keep it from being perfect. What keeps me coming back despite that is really the theme, and how easy the rules are to pick back up. Even after several months away, a two-minute refresher is all it takes to jump straight back in, and I enjoy every single play.
Final Thoughts
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is a complete, satisfying deck builder. Not flawless, but genuinely very good. You don’t need to have read the books or watched the movies to enjoy it, the escalating rules make it a great entry point for people new to board games. If you’re already an experienced deck builder, jump straight to year 3 or 4 and you’ll feel the difficulty climb fast. Just be ready to feel a bit desperate on some plays, the villains will absolutely give you a headache. But then again, if it were too easy, would we love it as much?
Your Turn
Have you played Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle? Which character have you loved playing the most, and which year gave you the hardest time winning? Come share your comments on Mastodon, Facebook, and BoardGameGeek.
Related Links
Videos
- Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle - GameNight! Se5 Ep1 - How to Play and Playthrough - 4 Players gameplay by BoardGameGeek team
- Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle - Year 4 - Playthrough & Final Thoughts - 2 Palyers gameplay by Before You Play
- Harry Potter - Hogwarts Battle - Full Solo Playthrough - Solo playthrough by The Solo Boardgamer
- Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle - Partida Juego de Mesa - Gameplay - Solo playthrough in spanish by Unna