A quick disclaimer up front: There is a lot of cultural context surrounding the “Harry Potter” series and in particular its author, J.K. Rowling. I acknowledge this, and I have a lot of my own opinions on it. That said, this article will be focused on reviewing the game on its merits or lack thereof and will be taking a blind approach to its source material. Please do not ask me to go into the rabbit hole that is Rowling discourse.
“Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle” (2016) is a deckbuilding cooperative game for 1-4 players. It was designed by Sean Fletcher, Forrest-Pruzan Creative, Kami Mandell, and Andrew Wolf, with art by Joe Van Wetering, and a wide variety of publishers.
Deckbuilders are a type of game somewhat similar to trading card games (TCGs) like “Magic the Gathering,” “Lorcana,” or “Pokémon.” You gather cards to form a deck and play them subject to certain rules to defeat enemies. You can attack, heal, draft, view upcoming cards, or any number of other actions. The key distinction is that TCGs largely involve you assembling you deck outside of the game. In deckbuilders, you increase the cards you have access to as you play. For instance, in this one, you can gain galleons, and spend them on new cards, which then get added to your deck.
Deckbuilders are also notable for typically being cooperative. This isn’t always the case, but it’s quite common to be player versus game rather than player versus player. “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle” is like this, though it does have a player-versus-player expansion.
This game also has some legitimately well-designed ways to handle mechanical complexity. Because the “Harry Potter” series is set over the seven years at Hogwarts, this game has seven distinct stages (one with enemies and encounters for each year). You can play just one or do a marathon where you play them all back-to-back in a pseudo-roguelike format. They also get progressively more difficult. Start on year seven and you will probably lose, even if you’re experienced and strategic. Start on year one, and your odds of winning are almost guaranteed. Somewhere around year four or five is where it becomes difficult to win unless you are very clear on what it is you’re doing. It’s honestly a really good way of adapting this to different skill level audiences.
With the main part of the review out of the way, I want to address the title for a moment. This game is, by far, the deckbuilder with the most widespread distribution I’ve come across. It’s not even a contest. I’ve seen it in legitimately mainstream stores like Target, whereas most deckbuilders are hard to find even at niche hobbyist stores. And within gaming communities — or really any type of community where there can be both mainstream and alternative versions — there often is some amount of elitism within alternative communities towards more mainstream examples. I mean, there are places where I feel like I’m too mainstream to say I enjoy independent games (even though I do) because I play “Dungeons & Dragons,” which obviously isn’t independent.
To be entirely honest, I think the indie gaming community is uncommonly susceptible to this as well. Yes, there is some alternative music that isn’t enjoyable to listen to and that will push people away. But the bar to get into it is very low — you just need to find some random band with 20 monthly listeners on Spotify, and suddenly you’re into indie music. Indie gaming is much harder. For one, you often need to buy expensive physical copies to even enter the community. Even once you have those, the games are often complicated and not friendly to the casual player. You might need multiple YouTube tutorials or a friend who’s been playing for years to teach you to understand the rules. Elitism takes hold much more easily when the bar of entry is higher.
Deckbuilders are a genre of game, no different from how you might have first-person shooters as a genre of video games. They also are massively experimental in their content – covering everything from high fantasy adventures to developing grammatical structures for a new language. And other than the “Harry Potter” deckbuilder, there’s only one that maybe, loosely, could count as anywhere near mainstream – and it’s notoriously unbalanced; its most high-level players struggled to win against the game.
This is actually why I really wanted to talk about this game. It’s well balanced, approachable, works well at various player sizes, utilizes the different Hogwarts years to provide different difficulty gameplay, can be played as a one-off game or a rogue-like, is meaningfully strategic, has fantastic theming that it utilizes well so new players can understand the different aspects of a complicated game by referring back to established and understood elements of the “Harry Potter” series, has beautiful art and design, and feels satisfying to play whether you win or lose. Deckbuilders are probably my favorite niche subgenre of indie games. And I would argue that this is the best one out there. When I review games, there are five factors I primarily consider: accessibility to learn and play, replay-ability, theming and art, strategic and mechanical complexity, and overall design and cohesiveness. This is the only deckbuilder I’ve encountered that doesn’t substantially compromise at least one of these areas.
Its mainstream distribution may have been because of the names attached, not because of it inherently being higher quality than other deckbuilders, and I acknowledge this. That said, the designers rose to the challenge of making deckbuilders something enjoyable to mainstream audiences, while still delivering on a high-quality deckbuilder for indie gaming nerds. But I know a bunch of said nerds who just passed this game over, because they assumed it wouldn’t be as good because it was oversimplified for mainstream audiences. I guess my experiences in this game are best seen as a caution against indie community elitism, because y’all whiffed on a very good game for being overly mainstream.
Who would I recommend this game for? I mean, this gets back into the whole politics of “it’ll support Rowling” that I said up front I wanted to avoid. If you don’t want to buy this game to avoid your money going to her, I understand. I’d still see if you can find a used copy, though. It’s a well-done game that would be appealing to “Harry Potter” fans, but also to card game nerds (eg. the drafting communities in “Magic: The Gathering”). It’s accessible enough to be a good entry point into a niche gaming type for those new to deckbuilders, but also still enjoyable to those with more experience. Just don’t pass this one over because it seems too widespread for indie or alternative games. Mainstream isn’t a bad thing.