Hogwarts Battle - The Monster Box of Monsters Expansion Card Game

My wife and I loved the base game, usually playing it at least once a month. We had been waiting to get the expansion but finally pulled the trigger and it is a great addition to the game!More Villains, more deck building cards, and some really cool abilities.Playing the full game with the expansion does add probably a couple hours depending on how you play, but it is completely worth the effort.

The Monster Box of Monsters adds new villains (i.e. Creatures), adds new, punishing mechanics (detention and a new horcrux-style modifer), a new playable character (Luna!) and several powerful new spells for your to use! This expansion actually distributes itself throughout the original base game - it is not played on its own or as an after-thought. The cards get literally shuffled into the base game's boxes and the villains replace or are added to the original villains. This expansion SIGNIFICANTLY increases the difficulty of the game. The moment a "year" starts you're required to deal with numerous NASTY mechanics and all you have to start are your original 13 cards (most of which are Alehemora, a simple currency acquisition). Why a little bad luck in card draw you can lose a game in a few turns. I found the game much more enjoyable with the added difficulty, though.Pros: Significantly changes and improves upon the original game. Much harder. Very neat new spells and interactions.Cons: Luna feels underpowered. The spell and dark-art-events cards in this expansion are a slightly different color AND SIZE than the originals, so they stick out a bit when you shuffle and you know when the next card is an expansion card. Really silly oversight in my opinion.

Favorite family game. Recommend for those with teens that love HP.

My teenage daughter and I love playing Hogwarts Battle together, but we have a pretty high win rate with just the two of us. Enter this expansion! The addition of the creature cards and mechanics, plus the detentions and encounters, make this a much more challenging experience. We have several losses under our belt, but at least a dozen hours of enjoyable game play, and each win feels a much more earned victory. We've finally made it past Box 3 and are eager and ready to start tackling Box 4!

The original game was a true delight to play through. Each of the boxes corresponded to books 1 -7 and years 1 -7 at Hogwarts beautifully. There were so many thoughtful touches and the attention to detail was spectacular. This expansion picks up where the base game leaves off by adding new creatures and characters and rules. Each time you move on to a new box, you're in for some sort of surprise that brings a freshness and new challenge to the game. We found Box 3 to be the hardest to beat, though it seems that much of the challenge of the game comes down to the luck of the draw for the villains and creatures that you must defeat. As many others have mentioned, the cards are a slightly different color and there may be an infinitesimal difference in the card sizing when compared with the base game. It's great to know that before purchase and easy to ignore when playing. I was hoping for some bigger shifts in the game play, but this expansion just makes slight variations to the established rules. In the charms and potions expansion, some bigger changes are afoot. Overall, this is a fantastic, engaging, ever-changing game that can be played over and over. Hardcore Harry Potter fans like myself will not be disappointed.

I love the fact that you and your family / friends play together to win the game. It isn't "I win - You lose". Very fun and gets more challenging as you progress up the games. The game promotes interaction and you work together to win. Our teenage grandchildren come over often to play and love it.

The base game, Hogwarts Battle, is amazing and a beloved favorite in our house. If you like the base game, I say this expansion is totally worth it! The additional hero, games, etc all add extra fun and playtime.That said, I feel like USAopoly cheaped out. As others pointed out, the material the cards are made out of is slightly different from the base game. Enough that they stand out. That's slightly annoying, but the biggest problem is that they feel cheaper. They're flimsier; ending up bent, curved, and folded easily. They are harder to shuffle, often sticking together. We shuffled as best we could, and still ended up with some of the new cards stuck together resulting in the same card coming up multiple times in a row. Even between games; so they stuck to each other through multiple sets of 8 riffle shuffles. Yikes.If the cards were just slightly different, I could forgive that; I don't know how hard it is to get cards printed exactly the same. But the cards being objectively worse quality is a big shame. If not for that this expansion would have easily been a five star from me.

This is a good addition to the game, but the game is still hard, lol. Added cards, villains, etc make this a fun addition, but if you draw the wrong ones first it can be really difficult.We did find one issue with "encounters" not always being fully described in the rules so it's hard to know how to accomplish them.We are looking forward to adding the potions expansion as well.