The one other significant component not shown is the dice, which are what make the Game 4 box bigger. Starting in Game 4, you will have access to the four dice, each representing one of the Hogwarts Houses. There are four different symbols on the dice: Influence, Attack, Card, and Health. Each die has all four symbols, plus two extra of one symbol:
- Gryffindor (red): Influence
- Slytherin (green): Attack
- Ravenclaw (blue): Card
- Hufflepuff (yellow): Health
Certain card effects will allow you to roll a die—when you do, every player gains the bonus that you roll. (The Card symbol means you draw a card from your own deck.) For instance, the Game 4 box does include some of the Hogwarts professors, and each one gives you some effect and allows you to roll the appropriate House die.
The dice themselves are translucent plastic, with the symbols screenprinted on them. The printing looks just like the icons on the cards (and tokens), so it’s pretty easy to understand, but because they aren’t engraved dice it’s hard to know whether the image will scratch off with extended use.
Two of the game boxes also include a small sheet of cardboard to punch out tokens—Game 3 has two shield tokens used for the Petrificus Totalis spell, and the Game 7 box has four House tokens to keep track of which dice have been rolled.
Have you played more since and have your opinions changed at all? I ask because I’ve played probably 20 games up through level 6 and starting around game 5 we started losing far more than winning- it’s not a bad thing at all- but it got a lot harder as we moved up. There seems to be a lot of “luck of the draw” with villains. You can get screwed right off the bat, or get harder ones later, once you’ve actually got a deck to play with. I’m an unabashed Potterhead, but I think I’d like this game even with a different theme. I’m just curious what your take is now!
Well, we’ve only played up through Book 4 so far—because we’re waiting on my middle daughter to finish reading the series. 🙂 She was never as much of a reader as her older sister, and stalled out after Book 4 a couple years ago. So we had to stop playing until she caught up, because I didn’t know what might be spoiled through the game, but we’ve also decided that we’re going to play through it as a family (instead of me skipping ahead with my game night friends).
I do see that it’s getting harder, though, simply because you have to get through the entire pile of villains every time, and we had some combinations of villains in Book 4 that were pretty nasty. But we’ve also had situations where a villain is very ineffective at the time it happens to come out, so I definitely see that luck of the draw plays into it. We do try to plan out which villain to go after first, and whether to pile all our attack in one place or spread it across all available villains.
I’ll be interested to see how it feels once we’re fighting three villains at a time!
Nice review. Just wanted to mention that I think there’s a typo in the 3rd paragraph of the Verdict section. “The new Dark Arts, Villain, and Location cards are shuffled in with the existing ones” — I think you mean Hogwarts rather than Location in this quote. If you add location cards in (rather than replacing the previous ones) each time you open a new Book, I think the game will become too easy.
Oops! You’re right—I’ll get that corrected!
Thank you!
I can’t find any information on how to use the Petrificus Totalis tokens. Does anyone have any tips?
Hi, Karen! It’s tied to the Petrificus Totalis spell, which will be mixed into the Hogwarts deck. You might flip through the deck to see it. Basically when you cast it, it shuts down one of the villains from using their power until your next turn, so you put the token onto the villain as a reminder.
When a Dark Arts event requires you to discard an ally or item, does it discard back into your pile, into the draw pile, or is it in the discard pile and out of the game? We can’t seem to find a clear answer in the instructions or online. Thanks for your help.
Hi! Any time you discard a card, it goes into your own private discard pile. It’s a typical rule for the deck-building style of game, but quite often the rulebooks assume that you’re already familiar with that gameplay and don’t spell everything out as clearly. They usually will use another term for removing a card from the game, like “trash” or “destroy”—I don’t think I’ve come across that particular effect in Hogwarts Battle, though.
If you get the dark arts card that says discard this item or lose 2 health, what if you dont have that specific item in your hand. Do you still lose 2 hearts?
My understanding is that if you have the item, you can choose, but if you don’t have the item, then you have to lose hearts.
My granddaughters and I are up to game 7. In game 5 Dolores Umbridge showed up with the ability, “Each time a Hero acquires a card with a value of 4 or more galleons, that Hero loses 1 heart.” We assumed that she was a “sleeper”… that she wasn’t effective until a later game, because there were no cards that had a value of 4 or more galleons. But having now reached game 7 there still are no cards with that value. Are we reading her action incorrectly? How are we supposed to interpret her ability?
Hi, Kit,
That’s the cost of acquiring cards from the Hogwarts deck, and there are cards even from Deck 1 that cost at least 4. For instance, the Lumos spell costs 4, and Dumbledore (who is present even from the first deck) costs 8. Hagrid also costs 4; the Nimbus 2001 from Game 2 costs 5. Any time any of those cards are acquired from the Hogwarts area, the hero who acquires it loses 1 heart.