If you had told us that a new Harry Potter spin-of would turn out to be one of the most surprising and satisfying gateway deckbuilders of recent years, we would’ve assumed you had been chugging one too many pints of butterbeer. Then Hogwarts Battle apparated onto our table and cast its spell over us. Hogwarts Battle is in so many ways deckbuilding by the numbers. Taking control of Harry, Hermione, Ron or Neville, players start with a small selection of spells, items and allies (slightly tailored to each character, so Harry gets Hedwig while Hermione has the Time-Turner and Crookshanks, for example) and magic up influence (resembling knut coins) in order to acquire cards from a central board and gradually bolster their power. Hardly revolutionary, we’ll accept.
More powerful cards can be used to attack a gauntlet of villains who, along with Dark Arts events drawn each round, will dish out damage to the heroes and gain control over a series of locations. The heroes can’t die, but getting stunned means another control token going on the current location – if the final location falls, it’s game over. As more villains combine powers and things chain together, the action can get surprisingly tense. There’s a good variety of events and abilities that can pop of, but they’re all grounded by an easy-to-grasp flow that means player turns and spells bounce back and forth with a joyous swiftness – a single match can be got through in under an hour easily, and you’ll immediately want to continue. Part of the reason for this is that, unexpectedly, Hogwarts Battle has taken a leaf out of the spellbook of legacy games. There are seven boxes to open over the course of the game’s campaign-like structure, loosely following the plot of JK Rowling’s seven novels (despite the visuals being based on the eight films) and steadily introducing new cards and even gameplay mechanics. While locations are specific to each chapter and represent the main set pieces of the movies, each fresh batch of villains, items, spells and characters are mixed into their respective decks for future matches and drawn at random, resulting in a kind of remixed ‘greatest hits’ feel to proceedings. Without giving too much away about exactly what each box contains – that’s half of the fun of playing through, after all – following the rough structure of the books works perfectly with the deckbuilding action. As the heroes progress through Hogwarts, their character cards are eventually replaced by their older selves, unlocking more advanced innate abilities and other surprises in addition to the growing reserve of cards available for purchase. fiings never go too far into left Theld, but there’s a real sense of reward and progression to opening the next package after a hard-fought victory.
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February 2018 (#15)
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