“Welcome to the start of another school year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Lessons need to be learned, challenges completed and classwork mastered. At the end of the year the house that does this best will be awarded the House Cup. Let the competition begin.”
3 words to describe this game: Hogwarts, knowledge and magic
Gameplay:
‘Over the course of seven rounds, the Students in your house will need to use Knowledge and Magic to Level up their abilities in Potions, Defense Against the Dark Arts, and Charms classes. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins the House Cup.’
During Phase one, you assign your students to classes. You can choose to learn a lesson (these are collected during gameplay) and you must meet specific requirements or you can place a student and collect the rewards indicated. Rewards come in many guises such as magic, knowledge, levelling up, choosing lessons or challenges etc
In Phase 2, students complete challenges. These challenges relate to different elements of the story which the characters encounter. Challenges can be achieved by a single character alone or by multiple characters. But in this phase, each character can only complete one challenge. In order to complete challenges, you will need to be a certain level in the different areas of magic and have knowledge tokens for example. Completing challenges will allow you to score points that you add to your house cup. 10 points is equal to one gem.
At the end of the seventh round, you count up your gems in your house cup, score points for maxed out level trackers and get points for pairs of magic and knowledge tokens.
Components:
Game board (this board is much larger than I expected)
4 common room player boards
36 level trackers (9 for each house)
The player boards are double layered so that there is a recess for the level trackers to fit into the player boards . This makes it easy to slide up the levels as characters complete lessons and level up.
12 student tokens (3 for each house) - the key characters for the Harry Potter stories for each of the houses - would have been cool with some minis but the cardboard chits work ok
18 location cards (differing difficulty) - these are selected randomly in each game
31 easy challenge cards
29 hard challenge cards
40 basic lesson cards
27 advanced lesson cards
1 first player token
1 round tracker
25 magic tokens
30 knowledge tokens
240 house point gems
1 house cup hourglass display
I like this display - it’s definitely gimmicky but a cool way of keeping track of the score and Harry Potter fans will love it
4 reference cards
Overall thoughts: First of all, I was pleasantly surprised by this game. I wondered initially if it would be a bit gimmicky and that perhaps having the Harry Potter name would mean that the theming would be better than the actual gameplay. However I enjoyed this game and even there are some elements of the game that are purely for the Harry Potter fans, it played pretty well and we had a fun time. By the way, not that I have anything against gimmicky because secretly adding gems to the house cup hourglass display is so satisfying as you see your points increasing. It looks cool on the table too. I’m sure Harry Potter fans will love it.
Thanks to The Op Games for sending out this copy for me to review
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