Welcome to Defense Against the Dark Arts

Last week we learned about building your deck and improving your skills as a budding wizard, as you prepare to defend against the Villains threatening HOGWARTS. This week for our Harry Potter™: HOGWARTS™ Battle previews, we are going to take a closer look at these Villains and the Dark Arts they employ as they work to bring about the return of You-Know-Who! Remember, in order to win each game, you will have to defeat all the Villains, and make sure you don’t fall prey to their Dark Arts attacks and insidious abilities.

Starting with Game 1, each game adventure will introduce a set of new Villains that you must defeat in order to win. In the first game, there will only be three Villains that you must defeat, and you only have to face one at a time. As you progress through each game, the number of Villains you must defeat will increase, as the Death Eaters grow in numbers and new ones appear. No one ever said this was going to be easy! Let’s take a look at an example of the sorts of Villains you will be facing in your efforts to defend HOGWARTS.

Each Villain has a Name, Ability, Health, and Reward. Here we have Crabbe & Goyle, sons of two of the most notorious Death Eaters known to the wizarding world. They have an Ability that will trigger each time a particular effect occurs, usually generated by a Dark Arts event.  Their Health of 5 in the lower-right corner is the number of Attack tokens that must be assigned to them in order to defeat them. Remember, some of your HOGWARTS cards like Incendio! allow you to gain Attack, and this is where it comes in handy! As you may have guessed, the Reward is what you gain when you assign enough Attack to defeat them.

Each game will also include a set of new Dark Arts events, adding even more dangerous effects to the stack of Dark Arts cards with each subsequent game. Dark Arts events have a variety of detrimental effects, including things like forcing the Heroes to lose Health or discard cards. Each turn you will reveal one or more Dark Arts events as the Villains launch attacks against the Heroes.

After resolving Dark Arts events, you will check to see if any of the Villain abilities trigger. Some will occur each turn, and others only if specific events take place. For example, in the case of Crabbe & Goyle, if the Dark Arts event revealed had been Flipendo! you would have lost 1 [HEALTH], discarded a card, then lost another 1 Health to Crabbe & Goyle’s ability! Those two are clearly up to no good, and need to be dealt with!

Join us next week as we wrap up our previews for Harry Potter™: HOGWARTS™ Battle. We’ll take a look at the Locations that the Villains seek to capture, how they increase their control over these Locations, and what the Heroes can do to thwart their efforts.

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