After 25 years, you have finally received that letter of admission to Hogwarts and have been invited to start next school year at this prestigious and magical institution. Will you make friends in the dark dungeon of Slytherin, the cosy living room of Gryffindor, the sunny courtyard garden of Hufflepuff or the reading room with crowded library of Ravenclaw? Either way, ditch all your Muggle responsibilities like doing taxes, updating insurance policies and, above all, your office job, and replace these with classes in which you have to wave wands furiously. All in the hope of getting a job at the Ministry of Magic: an office job, but magical! Before you can go to school, you have to buy your school supplies in the place that is almost as magical as Hogwarts itself: Diagon Alley! Do you know how to bewitch the chaos in Harry Potter: Mischief in Diagon Alley?
In this fast-paced, simultaneous dice game full of mischief, you and your fellow players try to control and bewitch the ‘chaos’. The game concept of Harry Potter: Mischief in Diagon Alley was first introduced by The Op in Mickey and Friends: Food Fight and is also seen in Disney Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas: Merry Madness. Mischief in Diagon Alley draws inspiration for its theme from the wizarding world of Harry Potter. In the game, first-year Hogwarts pupils rush to Diagon Alley with their shopping lists, but all the magical items are bewitched and scattered everywhere and nowhere, but not in the right place!
In this game concept, players simultaneously and as quickly as possible roll their dice to move objects. In total, there are three different game modes, but basically they work the same. Players are given three dice. One die depicts objects, one dice indicates left, right, the centre of the table or a spot of their choice, and the last die indicates a quantity. Depending on their roll, players must take a certain amount of a specific object from or give it to a specific player or the centre of the table. Depending on the game mode, players try to collect a single type of object or a set of different objects or try not to keep any object. Mischief managed!
In the first variant, players each take on the role of one of the shopkeepers of the Wegisweg: Eeylops Owl Emporium, the bookstore Flourish and Blotts, Ollivander’s Wand Shop, Quality Quidditch Supplies and Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. Players try to get the scattered brooms, books and other supplies to their proper places. A game is over once a player has cleared his shop and only the correct items are left. Shoot off items to your left, your right and even Diagon Alley… I mean diagonally… The player who finished first gets 3 galleons and then players get points for each correct item and minus points for every other item. In the other variants, players actually take on the role of students. In one of the other extra variants, they try to get one of each item and the other extra variant, on the contrary, they try to clear their suitcase and conjure away all the items.
Harry Potter: Mischief in Diagon Alley is a funny and fast-paced game. The main element is trying to roll the dice and perform your actions as quickly as possible. This makes for entertaining stress making it a quick game you can easily play in between. There are many games where players try to quickly roll dice and get rid of objects, but Mischief in Diagon alley has a nice theme and high production quality. The theme is pretty unrelated to the gameplay, but that needn’t spoil the fun.
