Every Potterhead who loves playing board games needs to get the Harry Potter Clue Board Game! Play to save your favorite character from the Dementors!
I grew up playing Clue whenever I could. It was probably my most played board game when getting together with friends who played. We didn’t play much more than dominoes with my family, so getting a chance to play Clue always a treat. So this week, when visiting my favorite comic shop, they got a new supply of Harry Potter Clue by USAopoly, and I had to buy it and play it immediately! (This post contains affiliate links)
Harry Potter Clue Unboxing
Each of the House Wheels – in the game play, if your Hogwarts Dice lands on a house card, the room revolves and exposes secret passages, closes doors, and might show the Dark Mark which brings you woe. The small yellow tokens are House Points that you have to start the game, and as a Dark Mark spell gets you, and you have no way to defend it (Help Cards), you lose house points.
One way this Harry Potter Clue board game is different from the original is that you can get booted out of the game before you ever make an accusation if you lose all of your house points. You can’t earn house points in any way, so it is a little disheartening when you keep getting the Dark Mark cards either from the House Die or the revolving rooms.
But it is a good spin on the original game. We ended up all losing our HP before our game play was over, but ended up just ignoring that aspect of the game for our first go-round since most of us lost our points so early on.
Here are your assorted pieces – Deck cards, clue envelope, playing pieces, wheel spinners, dice, dice stickers, instruction booklet and game play chart.
And just look at the instruction manual! They did a great job on theming the whole game.
Here is the House Die. You’ll need to put the stickers on yourself, and it does not matter the order. We found that our particular die seemed to be weighted to constantly land on the Dark Mark! (not really true, but it felt like it!)
Putting the House Wheels together – the white spinner goes on the bottom and the prong goes up through the wheel, then up through the game board.
The deck cards – Dark Mark cards, Help Cards, Character Cards and Mystery Cards along with the instruction book. My Hermione Granger Funko Pop figure was trying to figure it out all!
Here are the Characters available for the game. The only Pop we don’t have available for the game is Ginny since there is not an official Funko Pop Ginny Weasley. You can get custom ones from folks who do that kind of thing!
During game play, you use the suspect tokens to make accusations as you figure out who did it. We found that after the first couple of rounds, we just set them aside and didn’t use them at all.
Game play of Harry Potter Clue
This is basically like Clue.
- Roll a die
- Move towards a room
- Make an accusation
- Move towards another room
- Then head to Dumbledore’s office for your final accusation if you think you know.
How Harry Potter Clue is different from Clue
- House Die — This throws a kink into game play by giving you the chance to get more help cards, but more chances to revolve the rooms to create secret passages which lets you get around the board a little faster.
- House Points — House Points are given at the beginning of the game, and while you cannot earn house points, you certainly can lose them quickly by spells cast by the Dark Mark cards. While you can protect yourself with Help cards that protect against those spells, if you haven’t collected enough Help Cards, you may be doomed.
- Character in Danger – You pick a character, each game, who is in danger. You may or may not be able to save them.
What We Loved in Playing Harry Potter Clue
- We loved the fandom in playing the game – all the characters, the rooms, the look, the fun.
- The fact that you know who you are playing to rescue each game – and it’s different. Also, the fact that you might not be able to save them!
- We loved the spin on a traditional Clue game. While our first play ended up with all of us being out of the game by loosing House Points (we just ignored that bit and kept playing for our first round), the revolving rooms, and trip to Dumbledore’s office to get clues immediately made game play go a little faster in what can be a slow game.
What We Didn’t Like about playing Harry Potter Clue
- Those darned House Points —
- Some ambiguity of game rules — can you use 2 secret passages to travel in a single turn, do you enter a room by standing at the door, or do you have to roll enough to use going through the door as an extra step.
- Running out of sheets — we all know that you’re never going to save the sheets for 5 games per side, and while the game pad is a little larger than I remember it being as a child – I want to go scan it to print it out whenever we need it for the future!
How our first game ended.
Not only did we all lose our House Points before the end of the game, which would end in Harry never being rescued, we happened to get a few of the Mystery Cards stuck under the board game before starting, and none of us were able to guess the correct suspect. I am usually pretty savvy at Clue, and it confounded me how my guess wasn’t right, until we began putting the game away and found the errant cards. We still loved playing and plan on playing immediately over the long weekend and in the future.
At $39.99, while a little steep compared to the cost of the original board game, it is a great investment in hours of fun for the family!
We give it 3 out of 4 wands!
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