In J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, most famous for the tales of Harry Potter and his friends’ fight against the evil minions of Lord Voldemort, Hogwarts School trains young students to be the witches and wizards that they are meant to be. Each student is sorted into one of 4 Houses that feature different aspects of the students’ personalities. Gryffindor students are often brave but occasionally reckless. Slytherin students have to temper their ambition lest it become corrupt. Ravenclaw students are studious while Hufflepuff students are loyal and hardworking. As a way to drum up House spirit, the Hogwarts Headmaster hosts a House Cup Competition that lasts the entire school year. Small points are awarded along the way for good behavior and exceptional answers in class. More points are earned along the way for Quidditch matches played on flying broomsticks and for exceptional feats of wizardry and bravery. Poor performance in class and infractions of the school rules could result in points being deducted. At the end of the year feast, the House with the most points is awarded the Hogwarts House Cup. This theme is fertile ground for a competitive board game and The Op attempts to do that with the 2-4 player entry-level worker placement game, Harry Potter: House Cup Competition. For attempting this feat, I award The Op 10 points.
In a nod to the 7 years of Wizarding school, this game is played over 7 rounds. In Phase One players take turns placing their 3 students, one at a time, on spots on the board, Like Potions class, the Headmaster’s Office, or the Library, that allow them to gain Wizarding skills and magical resources, as well as access Lesson bonuses and Challenges to complete. A student cannot be placed on an action spot that already contains another student’s token. Some of the spots that become available later require that the student who goes to the space has developed higher levels of wizarding skills in order to use those spots. Then in Phase Two the students are retrieved from the board to face their Challenges, pooling their skills and resources as needed to earn points for their House. This is straightforward and with a little bit of planning players can collect skills levels and resources for the Challenges they already have access to, while collecting their Challenges to aim for in the next round. There are easy and hard challenges, rewarding harder endeavors with more points and perks. If chained properly, resources awarded for completing one challenge can be used to complete a second challenge. There is what seems to be an arbitrary limit of being able to complete a maximum of only 2 easy challenges or 1 easy and 1 hard challenge per round. For straightforward worker placement mechanics with some meaningful choices and strategy, I award The Op 20 points.
The game’s components are a mixed bag. The best feature of the game by far is the dynamic and eye-catching scoring tracker. At Hogwarts, the House Cup competition is tracked throughout the year in large glass hourglasses in the main Entrance Hall that would magically fill up or drain away colored gems as the students gained or lost points. This game replicates that experience with a sturdy cardboard rack that holds 4 cylinders which players fill with colored gems as they gain points. It is fun to watch the colored stacks of gems race each other during the game. The cardboard tokens are solid and the player boards are double-layered with recessed tracks for sliders that mark the players’ characters wizarding levels in the classes of Potions, Charms, and Defense against the Dark Arts. Unfortunately the sliders pop out easily if bumped. The “worker” tokens are cardboard tokens with the faces (but not the names) of students from each house, using photos from the movies. This would have been a good place for just colored meeples, but paintable miniatures would have been amazing (though certainly more expensive). The cards that feature Lessons (bonus powers) and Challenges (the tasks to earn points) are thin, but have clear graphic design, with one exception: the cauldron symbol for the Potions class and the shield symbol for the Defense class look similar enough to cause confusion from across the game board. The rulebook is clear with good explanations and illustrations and even an almanac section that provides more details about potentially confusing cards and actions spaces. For game components I am awarding 50 points for the score tracker, the rulebook, and the solid cardboard components, but I am subtracting 20 points for the confusing character tokens and symbology. 30 more points for The OP!
The House competition theme is featured throughout the game, but it has some problems. The students raise their power by going to classes and earning Knowledge and Magic tokens to help them complete tasks. There are additional locations represented by cards on the board that are swapped out for each game for a little bit of variability and feature locations and photos from the Wizarding World found outside of school, like The Leaky Cauldron and The Burrow. While it makes sense that going to classes on the main board action spots will level up the students’ magical skills, it is less clear why visiting the candy store Honeydukes will level up your students 2 levels in their class skills or why visiting Gringotts Bank earns you lots of Knowledge tokens. Since players need to complete challenges by using their wizarding skills, it makes sense that winning a midnight duel might take some skill in Potions, Defense, and a Knowledge token, but it is confusing why a student would need skill in Charms and Defense to simply board the magical Hogwarts Express train to school. Theme breaks like these are why I can only award The OP 20 points for their use of theme from a world that is rich in theme.
I am not a game designer. I am a board game player and part time reviewer. I am also a Harry Potter’s Wizarding World fan. I think the stories are engaging. I think the movies are excellent. I have Gryffindor robes that I wore again for Halloween this year. I have mixed up my own butterbeer (think root beer, but butterscotch-flavored). I saw The Cursed Child a few months before Broadway was shut down. I have played and enjoyed The Op’s co-operative deck builder, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. As I mentioned earlier, I knew that this theme of a competition that already existed in the lore of this world was ripe for a good board game, but I had several problems with its execution. The students didn’t need to demonstrate any special skills and there was no chance of failure to complete tasks. If Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger between them had at least 2 levels in Charms and 5 levels in Defense and turned in 1 Knowledge token, they had everything they needed to get past a Hungarian Horntail dragon. No matter what. If they forgot to check out that book, they could ignore the dragon for a year and go to the library next year to get that book and then defeat it.
While each player’s 3 starting characters are getting more powerful throughout the game, there are still only 3 students available to occupy 3 spaces each round. Because of the leveling up of the students, it wouldn’t be practical for new underpowered students to join a House later. However, it would have been nice in later rounds to have more ways to redeploy a student to an additional space other than a rare Lesson card. While Hogwarts students would often interact and interfere with each other in the stories, there is virtually none of that here, other than getting to a particular action space first and locking out the other students. There are no opportunities to lose points for missteps or stumbles, as the students of Hogwarts often faced. Besides being different colors, there were no differentiations between the strengths and weaknesses of the Hogwarts Houses, which is the entire point of the students being sorted into houses. I mention these things not to be negative or to try to redesign this game, but I wanted to explain why these aspects of this game ultimately disappointed me enough to deduct 30 points from The Op for failing to live up to my expectations as a Harry Potter and board gaming fan.
If we pour out these virtual gems and count them as one would at the end of this game, we see that The Op has scored 50 points! Out of how many? Just like in the stories, that really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this is a family-weight entry to worker placement games that will bring in Harry Potter fans to the world of modern board gaming. From there, the elder wizards and witches of the board gaming hobby will lead them to new games that will help them level up their board gaming skills even further. Who knows – maybe The Op will tackle a board game adaptation of Quidditch next and knock that bludger right out of the stadium. I hope they try. I look forward to playing it if they do.
This review is brought to us by our friend Jason. He is a big fan of the Harry Potter series and loves to play games with his family and friends.
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