This is a cooperative game in which the players assume the roles of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, and Neville Longbottom, and try to defeat a pile of attacking villains before those villains can conquer a series of locations. You buy new cards to expand your deck (allies, items, and spells), amass attack power to vanquish the villains, and work together to lean into each player's strategic strengths.
Hogwarts Battle doesn't have a lot of all-new elements never before seen in a deck-building game. But it does manage to mix the genre staples in its own clever way -- and gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that this is a cooperative game. Most key: a player can generate resources for other players to bank and use on their next turn.
It all starts out a great deal more simple than most deck-building games... though this simplicity comes off more a strength than a liability. If you're a gamer parent raising gamer children, this is quite accessible, and a good deal more fun to play than many alternatives that work well with kids. It's likely you'll have to do the constant shuffling that accompanies a deck builder, but that's vastly preferable to playing a game you secretly don't like.
And Hogwarts Battle doesn't stay so simple. It's actually a campaign game, with 7 "years" (scenarios) corresponding to the seven books. Win the game in Year 1, and you then open up a little box of Year 2 materials to add in -- new cards for players to buy, new villains for them to defeat, and sometimes new mechanics to add to the system. And always, new challenges to overcome. The game is quite easy for experienced gamers in Year 1 -- so much so that the rules even suggest skipping ahead to Year 3 if you're a wily veteran of deck-building games. But later years (especially Year 5 and 7) provide significant challenges you won't likely defeat on the first attempt.
The game went over so well, in fact, that many of us have in the group have played it all the way through, twice. Three of us were happy to experience it all first with one friend in the fourth slot, and then another. Add in a few instances I've played it with still more friends, and you get a deck builder I've played more than any I didn't personally work on. And I'm honestly still not tired of it. We put it into hibernation for a bit to give time to other games, but I've already picked up the game's expansion (The Monster Box of Monsters) and we're coming back around now to tackle that.
My only real reservation about the game is one that is perhaps unavoidable in a cooperative game: it is sometimes unwinnable. Certainly, I want to be challenged by a cooperative game and have the potential to lose it. But there's a difference between a scenario that's stacked against you and one that is literally impossible. Because setup of these types of game is often left in large part to random chance, you can get a scenario that you cannot win, no matter what you do. Such is the case here. I feel like the absolutely perfect cooperative game would ensure that every playthrough is at least theoretically winnable. I know of no other game that has actually cracked this nut, though, so I can't really be that sad about it not being the case here. Better to challenge, I think, than risk boredom.
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle is not just a great property tie-in game, it's a great game, period. I give it an A-. Unless you a gamer who just doesn't like any deck-building games (or cooperative games), it should be in your collection.
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