Harry Potter: House Cup Competition

Board Game Geek Reviews

1. 7 out of 10

   djnesq

   Complete challenges using your students' attributes and receive the rewards. Level up the attributes and complete more rewarding challenges. Nothing new here, but still fun.

2. 7.2 out of 10

   ronrubin

   This is a fun game for Harry Potter fans. First game felt a bit disorienting, but after we got the idea, the next plays became really enjoyable. We are now playing it quite a bit. The game itself is quite simple - you basically have a bunch of goal cards ("challenges") laid out to collect, and at the end of each of 7 rounds, you will have the chance to score as many of them as you can. These goal cards keep refreshing as they are collected, which makes the game interesting and dynamic. With good planning you will often be able to pull off multiple goals among your three characters, which feels very satisfying to achieve. At the same time, there are smaller intermediate goal cards ("lessons") which you can collect and fulfill during the round, and these give you different kinds of goodies and special powers. What makes the game interesting and unique (and also a bit confusing the first time) is the worker placement spots, which are all multi-action. Most spaces will give you a trait upgrade or one or more tokens (which are very useful for multiple purposes), and also a lesson or challenge card. So, you may be interested in a specific upgrade or token, and the extra card you get may not be relevant to that plan at all. Hopefully, later on you will figure out a plan for that card. Or you may be very interested in a specific card, but also have to decide which additional benefit could be most useful for another future goal. Or in some cases, the two actions could combine towards the same goal, which is great. In any event, once you wrap your head around these multi-action worker placement locations, the game becomes really interesting and enjoyable. Overall, we like the game very much. It is fun, there is good tension, and the choices are meaningful. Player interaction is at the right level for us - no direct conflict, but there is a clear race for the worker placement spots and the cards on the board, and you must prioritize your actions. Scoring has been very tight for us so far. As Harry Potter fans, the theme definitely plays a large role in our enjoyment of the game, and I can say that just the raw mechanisms would probably not be as compelling to us with another theme. So if you are not HP fans, this may just be another worker placement point race game for you. The one big negative about this game is the clear lack of IP rights for the production. In contrast to The Op's previous Harry Potter game, Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle, here it is obvious they did not actually receive full rights to use the Harry Potter IP, and this is strongly felt throughout the game. In fact, other than the logo and small character tokens, there are NO photos from the movies whatsoever. The artwork is completely generic, and could have fit any generic wizarding world. The house logos have been redrawn as well, and are similar but not identical to the movie. The character names are there, the setting is there, as are references to several events from the books and movies. However, many of cards have vague text which does not always mention specific characters in the HP universe. The four house names themselves are not mentioned anywhere in the rulebook or the playerboards. The whole thing is quite weird. It is so obvious I had to reduce 1/2 a point for this (the game itself is an 8/10 for us). In summary - fun game, interesting mechanisms, good theme, great component quality. Only a lack of artwork from the movie and other references to the Harry Potter IP reduce the score for us. On the whole, warmly recommended for Harry Potter fans who enjoy medium-weight worker placement games.

3. 5 out of 10

   mrhyde89

   [b]:yellowtrain: Weight:[/b] low complexity, average playtime. [b]:meeple: Recommended # of players:[/b] it seems to scale fairly well. [b]:!block: Remarks:[/b] It seems a solid, balanced game but devoid of life. It's a light worker placement, spend X to get Y, very approachable. There is nothing peculiar or interesting, speaking of mechanics, it's pretty dull but it works. I have 2 issues with the game: artwork and theme. Artwork is very lacklaster, there are a lot of tiny black icons. The size of the cards do not help as well because they come in a small size. There is basically only text on the cards and on the board. The are some small pictures on location tiles and on the student tokens. Everything is so boring and unmagical! Theme is there only through the title on the box and the names of the components. It feels very pasted on. Location do not have any thematic tie with the action available on their spot. Challenge cards are named after some events occurred in the books but they are just a list of requirements to be fulfilled, but again do not feel really distinct from each other. Same goes for lessons. The cool plastic colored gems and tubes are a nice gimnick to cater attention and help with the theme absence, but it's a fancy feature that gets old pretty fast, as you interact with those no more than a couple of times each round and do not implement a peculiar functionality. They replace a standard victory point tracker.