Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle

59.99$

En stock

Ce produit est seulement disponible en anglais.

In Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, the forces of evil are threatening to overrun HOGWARTS castle in this new cooperative game! It’s up to four students to ensure the safety of the school by defeating villains and consolidating their defenses. Players take on the role of a HOGWARTS student: Harry, Ron, Hermione or Neville, each with his or her own personal deck of cards. To secure the castle from the forces of evil the students must work together to build more powerful decks using iconic Wizarding World characters, spells, and items.  Defeat all the villains including He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and win the game!

Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle (hereafter just Hogwarts Battle) takes players on a journey through the seven films adapted from the books. They span the years of Harry Potter learning at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, meanwhile encountering the likes of various villains and one particular villain who-should-not-be-named. Players achieve their goals through some pretty standard deck building mechanisms and combating villains with spells, items, and companions along the way.

The main board for Hogwarts Battle is exceptionally made and holds up well to repeated plays. Although the spaces hint at what is to come, overall the board provides just the right space for card play. Included as well are player boards which focus players and provide locations for starting character cards, round reference cards, tokens, and health tracking. The cards are also of exceptional quality and can be shuffled repeatedly with little sign of wear.

The art for the components and cards fits right in the Harry Potter universe. Spells, locations, and characters are broadly represented, even with some of the more minor characters. The imagery for the cards is mainly taken from the films.

One of the most stand out components is the rulebook. It’s welcoming and well laid out, explaining as much as is needed in a friendly sequence. The additional game boxes will add rules to the game, as can be expected by the placeholder slots for rules in the back of the rulebook. The overall presentation of the game allows for repacking the game into its original state should a new gaming group inherit the game.

Probably the coolest component are the heavy metal location control markers used to denote how much villains are in control of game locations. They’re small, hexagonal metal tokens with a fearsome skull. They help to give intensity when they’re placed on a location, advancing the plot to the players’ defeat.

Hogwarts Battle presents players with seven game boxes representing an adaptive, progressively more difficult game each time the players successfully complete their objectives. There are new game mechanisms revealed with the various boxes, but the content can be predictable if players have seen the movies.

A game of Hogwarts Battle begins with setting up three primary decks: a Villain deck, the Dark Arts event deck, and the Hogwarts deck. These decks form the core of interactions with characters, items, villains, and spells. The Villain cards and Dark Arts events represent eponymous challenges or enemies to overcome while the Hogwarts deck provides allies, equipment and education in spells.

Each player’s turn begins with revealing a certain number of Dark Arts events based on the current location, represented by a card in the upper left corner of the board. Usually three stacked locations are present for each game. Dark Arts events represent the machinations of the villains as they seek to gain control of the location. Some cards directly harm the players. Other events will cause harm only when certain cards are played, or they might add location control markers to the Location card.

Next to be resolved on a player’s turn are any Villain Card effects. These are similar to the Dark Arts events but, because they stick around from turn to turn, they have the potential to form combinations with the event cards or with other villains (not a spoiler because the game board shows spots for three villains). Once multiple Villains appear, players should know the game strategy can change.

Hopefully, if a player isn’t too aggravated from dealing with all of the above, the main part of a player’s turn begins. In this step, cards are played from a player’s hand to gain influence to purchase Hogwarts cards, gain lightning bolt tokens to damage the villain, regain health, or draw cards. The influence and lightning bolt tokens are mainly used to keep track of how many of each a player has, placing them on their player board. This is key because it is possible to gain these tokens on another player’s turn, adding to the total available to the player on their turn.

The game continues in this pattern with player turns until all villains are defeated (player victory) or control markers are placed on all locations (villain victory). Players can progress to the next game box or replay if they did not achieve the box’s objective.