Here There Be Monsters

Earlier this year, I sang the praises of the deck-building game Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. Since then, I've played all the way through the game's first expansion set, The Monster Box of Monsters, giving me another chance to recommend this fun cooperative card game.

The Monster Box of Monsters continues the original game's campaign system, adding four new boxes of new materials to open in sequence and add to the game. The major new mechanic of the expansion is creatures, a new group of cards to supplement the villains you must normally defeat during a game. Some of them have a new way you must defeat them (using the resource you normally spend on deck-building), but beyond that, the key difference is that old cards that work on villains don't work on creatures, while new cards that work on creatures don't work on villains.

That kind of subtle distinction is sort of what this expansion is all about. There isn't a lot that's revolutionary here. A new card type is added in one of the four boxes you open... but it works quite similarly to a card type from the original game (and, in fact, must be used instead of that older card type when you do use it). Luna Lovegood is included as a new playable character, but the game still caps at four players, and Luna's new cards (while interesting) don't make a case for her character being as indispensable as most of the original four player characters of Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville.

On the other hand... a strong case can be made that a game expansion doesn't need to completely upend everything you know about the original game; a solid expansion can instead just deliver more of what you loved about the core experience. That might even especially be true of a deck-building game, where even something as basic as new cards for the decks can change the experience. Through that lens, The Monster Box of Monsters gives you exactly what you'd want. The new creatures, and the Encounter cards that set up particular conditions your group must overcome in sequence, provide interesting new challenges, while the new cards you can buy for your player decks are fun variations on what you've become used to.

The balance of the boxes might be a bit off? For our group, Box 1 was by far the most difficult of the four, requiring multiple attempts and some lucky shuffles to defeat. But then, it's not as though we weren't going to play all four boxes, so perhaps it's completely irrelevant which one posed the greatest challenge to us. Indeed, just as with the core game itself, we'll be playing through the entire expansion with two different (slightly overlapping) sets of players, each group looking forward to the experience.

The bottom line: "more of the same" may not be the most exciting tag line for a board game expansion. But when "the same" is as fun and enjoyable as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, it's not exactly faint praise. I'd give The Monster Box of Monsters a B+. Anyone who has played Hogwarts Battle and liked it should also pick up the expansion.