We’re a bunch of Harry Potter fanatics around here…we’ve all taken the Pottermore Sorting and Patronus Quizzes, read the books independently and together, listened on audio, watched the movies, dressed up as its characters for Halloween…so it was high time we played a Harry Potter board game!
Battle for the Castle is superbly congruous with the books, which pleases my purist children…each element of the game lines up with something directly from the book which just further feeds our hunger for Harry Potter trivia!
Hogwarts Battle is a cooperative game for 2-4 players, each of whom chooses a HERO to play as for the game: Hermione, Neville, Harry, or Ron.
The game is played through 7 Adventures, one for each of the Heroes’ years at Hogwarts.
Players start out with their own deck and add to it through the game by buying spell, item, and ally cards to strengthen their defenses. Each card lets the heroes gain health (heart icon) or attacking strength (lightning bolt icon)
Each Adventure has locations, events, spells, allies, and villains specific to that year and the challenge is to DEFEAT THE VILLAINS before they defeat the HEROES.
In Game 1, for example, Draco Malfoy, Quirrel, and Crabbe and Goyle must to be defeated to win that adventure.
The Location cards (Diagon Alley and the Mirror of Erised) indicate how many Dark Arts Events to reveal at the beginning of each player’s turn. The Events have a variety of poisonous effects like adding a Dark Mark to the location, losing strength, etc.
Turns in each Adventure/Game consist of 4 actions:
- Reveal and resolve Dark Arts Events: Bad Stuff
- Resolve Villain Abilities: More Bad Stuff
- Play Hogwars Cards/Take Hero Actions: Good Stuff (playing cards to gain resources, attack villains, buy new cards)
- End Turn: Check villain’s progress, refill empty spaces for Hogwarts cards, discard all cards, unused attack and influence tokens, draw new hand
Each Adventure includes more and more powerful villains to defeat, but also more powerful allies and spells. It’s a nail-biting race to the finish to see if Good will, yet again, Overcome Evil!
Several new elements are added in periodically throughout the game.
- Game 4 adds a set of dice that players use to determine certain kinds of resources.
- Game 6 adds OWL achievements.
- Game 7 adds horcruxes.
Will the heroes prevail?!?
They will if my wizards have anything to say about it! 
Hogwarts Battle is one of our FAVORITE cooperative board games and I love how the game encourages teamwork. Heroes must always work together to defeat evil!
I like to use this as a reading game to give practice to my 1st and 3rd graders – there is lots of reading to do on the villain, events, and Hogwarts cards and the words are challenging! It’s a great way to stretch their abilities in a fun way that they’re motivated by the game to be successful at.
Thanks to The Op Games for sharing with us!
