Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions is so mindless I renegotiated my car insurance while playing

OCTOBER is coming up, and that’s when I need to renew my car insurance and get my car’s MOT sorted.

It’s tough finding time for everything – getting your car insurance renewed automatically is easiest, obviously, but it’s not the way to get the best deal possible. 

So when I started playing Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions and I got an email notification about the upcoming renewal, it was time to multitask.

Quidditch, Harry Potter’s magical in-universe version of football, is a team game, and that gave me an idea. 

What would happen if, during my hour-long ordeal with my insurer’s chat support, I simply let my teammates play the game for me? What’s the worst that could happen?

So I jumped into the Hogwarts House Quidditch Cup on Casual Mode, and loaded up my policy details on my phone. 

At this point I put my controller down and just allowed the game to take its natural course.

My quoted renewal price had already vastly improved after a year of no claims bonus, but my voluntary excess was still too high. 

My main task was to reduce my voluntary excess while – hopefully – retaining the same annual price for insurance. 

My other task was to come out on top in the Quidditch Cup, and I had faith that Casual Mode would lead me to victory.

It was a tough back-and-forth at first. My team of Hufflepuff players were fighting against the Ravenclaws with all their might, and the Quaffle found its way through both hoops more than once. 

At the same time, the online chatbot was quickly connecting me through to a real person, who would wait multiple minutes between sending each single-sentence message.

Winning a game of Quidditch in Quidditch Champions requires your team to score 100 points, or have the most points when time elapses. 

Each time a Quaffle goes through a goal a team gets 10 points, and each time the Seeker grabs the Snitch the team gets 30 points. This can rapidly turn the tides in a close match.

Not that I was worrying about any of that, it was my team’s job. 

I was focused on removing my voluntary excess, and when I queried how my policy price would change with a voluntary excess of zero, the policy quote price went up by £600. 

When asked if I was happy with this proposal, I replied “lol, no.”

If both teams have the same amount of points when the clock times out, it becomes a Sudden Death: the next team to score points wins. 

When playing solo you can swap between members of your team quickly and easily, allowing you to jump to defence or chasing the Snitch as necessary, but you can also play in a team and have each player take a distinct role.

With the £600 annual increase rejected, I instead queried what the price difference would be if I simply halved my voluntary excess. 

With the halved excess, my annual quoted price returned to what it was before I began the entire investigation. 

At that point, I was willing to settle; I’d only get a meagre saving by insuring elsewhere unless I installed a black box (no thanks), and I’d effectively achieved what I set out for.

While waiting multiple minutes for replies in the chat box between each query, I’d tap a button on my DualSense controller to start the next match. 

In Casual Mode, your team handily clears every challenge put in front of them without any input from yourself. 

It’s trivial in the most literal sense, and even in the Standard difficulty you’ll have matches go to Sudden Death or win by a hair – again, without you ever having to actually play the game. 

It’s not the best way to make progress, but you do still get rewards even for losing matches.

Multiplayer games are often plagued by NPC teammates that are useless in single-player modes, and Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions might’ve overcorrected in this regard.

Though you also can’t be expected to score every goal yourself when there are up to six players from each team on the field. 

It’s a tough juggle, but when I actually had to play during the tutorial, I did think it played nicely.

And yes, I have had the game play itself while I typed this – I lost the first match but overwhelmingly won the second. Maybe I’ll actually play it when my car gets that MOT.

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