Harry Potter™: HOGWARTS™ Battle Deck-Building Game – Class is Now in Session


Harry Potter™: HOGWARTS™ Battle Deck-Building Game BLOG #2 – Class is Now in Session

Acquiring New HOGWARTS Cards and Building Your Deck

Welcome back for more HARRY POTTER™ HOGWARTS™ BATTLE A Cooperative Deck-Building Game card preview! This week we will be sharing details on some of the HOGWARTS cards that you can acquire and use to build your deck. Remember, as in most deck-building games, you start with a personal ten-card starting deck. Each turn you draw a new hand of five cards from your deck; when your deck runs out of cards, you shuffle your discard pile into your new deck, including the new HOGWARTS cards you acquired on your turn. Here’s are some of the things to keep in mind as you train to improve your wizarding skills:

Let’s say you are playing as Harry, and have a starting hand of four Alohomora! cards and your Invisibility Cloak card. Each card describes what it does when you play it, and most allow you to collect resources in the form of Influenceor Attack tokens. You can and should play all the cards in your hand if possible, and try to use all your accumulated tokens each turn, because anything left over must be discarded at the end of your turn. Play your five cards to gain 5 tokens, collecting them on your Player Board.

Now let’s see what you can do with all that Influence. At the start of each game, you will shuffle the HOGWARTS cards and deal out the top six on the game board. These are the initial cards available for you to use your Influence to acquire and add to your Hero deck. Each card has a Type (either Ally, Item, or Spell), Name, Effect, and Value. To acquire a card, you must spend Influence equal to its value, and place the card in your Discard Pile. You don’t get to play newly acquired cards immediately, and must wait until they shuffle back into your hand for you to play them.

With 5 Influence, you have a lot of options. You might want to spend 3 Influence for Quidditch Gear and 2 Influence for Essence of Dittany, to make sure you’re ready for the battles to come. Another option would be to spend time studying your spellwork, and acquire Reparo! andWingardium Leviosa! to give you the ability to acquire higher-value cards. You could acquire Hagrid as an Ally, leaving you with 1 Influence left over that you would have to discard at the end of your turn. The choice is yours! At the end of your turn you will reveal new HOGWARTS cards, replacing the ones you acquired, so that there are always six available to acquire on each Hero’s turn.

Notice that some HOGWARTS cards benefit only you, while others can aid any one Hero or even ALL Heroes! Remember, Harry Potter™: HOGWARTS™ Battle is a cooperative game, so it will be important for you to work together and figure out which cards pair best with each Hero, and build your decks to be the most powerful wizards you can be. Also important to note is that even though you can’t save cards or resources on your turn, you can gain resources on another Hero’s turn. You get to keep and use those resources on your turn, in order to help out one another. With that in mind, here’s a sneak peek at a couple more card that you won’t see in your first game, but you’ll find starting with Game 2:

Check back next week, when we’ll take a closer look at the Villains, their Dark Arts, and some of the ways in which they seek to defeat Harry and his friends in an attempt to bring about the return of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named!

HARRY POTTER characters, names and related indicia are © & ™ Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter Publishing Rights © JKR.  (s16)