Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle Review

A cooperative deck builder set in the Harry Potter Universe. Sounds like a hit, but is it any good?

Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle is a deck building game that sees you play through 7 scenarios while playing as the heroes from the books. On your turn, you will flip over a dark arts card and deal with the consequences of that and the villain(s) on the board. Then you will play your cards. You always start with five cards in your hand. You play them and do whatever actions are on the cards. This can be anything from gaining currency to buy better cards or dealing damage to the current enemies on the board. After you play your cards, you assign the damage tokens and buy new cards and then refresh back to five cards and the next character will go. Defeat all of the enemies for the scenario and you win but if you lose control of all of the locations on the board, you lose.

The Good: This is a really solid deck builder. It does not reinvent the genre by any means but it does a great job at what it is. If you know the Harry Potter universe then you'll feel right at home. I absolutely love that the game is scenario based. Having the opportunity to replay the game is a huge plus. I played this solo and managing two characters was really easy to do. If you're someone who primarily plays solo, this is totally doable.

The Okay: It is hard to clear your deck of some of the junk cards. Each turn when you buy new ones they go into the discard pile and the deck just gets larger. I wish there was an easier way to trim the fat (I've only played up to scenario 2 so far when writing this so I could be off here).

The Not So Good: I've never been a fan of using photos on cards and I probably never will be. Part of the big draw to board games for me is the artwork so I just don't like to look at photos of characters or locations. It does not effect gameplay at all but I still don't like it.

Overall Score: 8/10

I've had a lot of fun with Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle. Most scenario based games I don't have much interest in trying to finish but for some reason I really want to get through all 7 scenarios and maybe the expansions if it all goes well. I'm not the biggest Harry Potter fan so once I get past scenario 4 I'll be pretty unfamiliar with the story and characters. Maybe I should watch the movies (who has time to read books?).

Thanks to The Op for sending a review copy my direction.