Harry Potter: Death Eaters Rising

Good evening, today, Hector, Amanda and myself fought against the forces of the dark Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter: Death Eaters Rising. Please accept our humble apologies for the lack of a review yesterday, but we were without power for most of the evening. Instead of trying to rush one out late at night, we will be posting this one now and a second one later tonight.

Amanda and I are both avid fans of the Harry Potter world, at least in terms of the original books and movies. As a result we end up playing or purchasing nearly every Harry Potter related game that comes out. At first glance, Death Eaters Rising seemed a natural fit for us, being a fun co-op game with a strong theme, and the components reflect this. There are custom dice, a gigantic “bigature” of Voldemort, and cards as well as a board.

The production values for this seem all over the place for me, ranging from bland to terrific and overproduced. The gigantic Voldemort piece looks great, but is almost entirely unnecessary and probably added $10 to the cost of the game. It is literally used for nothing other than pointing at one of three possible spaces. It could easily have been replaced with a smaller piece or a standee, and placing it in the middle of the board makes the already incredibly bland board look even duller by comparison. The cards are decent and functional, using stills from the live action films and good graphic design, though they feel somewhat cheap to the touch. The custom dice are excellent, being both hefty and solidly designed. The rulebook is okay, though not particularly well done for such a simple game, so it’s a big of a mixed bag all around.

As far as gameplay goes, it’s pretty simple and involves chucking a lot of dice. You start by picking one of the hero factions and a starting character. Each turn you move your team to a location, then Voldemort moves and the location he points at gains corruption, any wizards there are damaged and local death eaters activate. Players then roll their dice pool and take actions that the dice allow, rerolling and taking actions until there are no dice left in the pool. Actions include things such as recruiting wizards, activating abilities or attacking death eaters. Voldemort’s card arrives halfway through the game and can be attacked, but not defeated, until 5 death eaters have also been defeated.

The gameplay itself is not bad on paper as long as one does not mind chucking dice, however it suffers from several key faults that keep it from rising above the level of a mediocre co-op. The first is the difficulty, the game is brutally hard on your first couple of turns, especially if you have bad luck. I nearly lost the game for us without being able to recruit a single character for my first several turns, however once we started getting a team together Amanda and I were able to control both damage and corruption with relative ease, even with some very unlucky rolls. I suspect the game is generally won or lost in the first 5 turns or so, but there will be many, many more turns then that till the end.

The second fault and probably worse of the two is that Death Eaters Rising rapidly wears out it’s welcome. I very much enjoyed the first half of the game, despite the massive swings in difficulty, however for the second half of our play it felt rather like a grind. There are some turns where you are basically just performing maintenance on the board. Oh look, Voldemort and a death eater put corruption on Diagon Alley and damaged wizards, better go clear it off and dish out some healing, and the entire turn is spent doing nothing but undoing what Voldemort did to the board, with no progress being made by either side. There were far too many of these turns, in my opinion.

I don’t see the two player game changing much from say, a 4 player game. I suspect players will specialize a little more, with some focusing on corruption, some on healing and some on damaging death eaters and Voldemort. In our game Amanda and I both ended up with a mixed bag of wizards doing a little of everything.

Overall I think I would give this a cautious recommendation to fans of the wizarding world, it’s not a great game, but it’s not terrible either. This would be a decent game for people who just really love to chuck dice, or perhaps for younger gamers to play with their parents, or casual gamers who just love the theme. The components do seem to appeal more to younger gamers and children then adults. For anyone else, there are both better Harry Potter games out there, and better Harry Potter co-op games available.

Note: I was really excited for this because it seemed like it would be a lot of fun, and the first half was, but it got to the point where it felt like the whole thing was being dragged out and that took a way a lot of the enjoyment. Also after spending so much time fighting to get a certain number of symbols to win people to your team, it seemed almost laughable how few attack dice you had to get to get Voldemort himself (and somewhat amusing that it had to be three swords, to be honest.) As a total Harry Potter nerd I have to say it looks great, but I don’t intend to play it again anytime soon.

The Teal Dear

Game: Harry Potter: Death Eaters Rising
Designer: Patrick Marino, Andrew Wolf
Price: $60
Players: 2-4
2 player Scaling: Very playable, more general and less specialized
Playtime: 90ish minutes
Estimated Lifespan: 5ish plays, unlikely to enter permanent collection
Average Play Frequency: Quarterly
Complexity: 3
Components: 4.5
Bang for Buck: 2
Value for Time: 2.5
Fun Factor: 3.5
Overall: 3