Even after all this time, Devourer Below remains one of the most difficult scenarios in Arkham Horror.
Due to the encounter deck recursion and the large number of cards that add doom (roughly half the deck), you're going to at best get 8-9 turns before Umordoth spawns. The other half of the deck that isn't doom cards are enemies, four of which are very hardy.
This would be enough to make this challenging, but the random location debuffs make it dangerous to even explore.
All in all, this scenario should honestly be skipped when introducing people to the game unless they like getting stomped on. Most, even good viable parties, will end in failure on this scenario.
Half the deck is doom cards? What? There's 3 Ancient Evils, 3 Acolytes, Wizard of the Order, and 2 Mysterious Chanting. 9/29 is not half, and it's not even particularly scary doom generation because you can just kill the Acolytes/Wizard to remove the doom. Honestly compared to drawing Umordhoth's Wrath which is the real killer here, you're happy to draw the Dark Cult cards. People say that Devourer is still one of the hardest scenarios today, but I haven't found that to be the case in my anecdotal experience. With the modern cardpool it's very doable to stop the ritual in time. It only uses Core encounter sets, which aren't really that scary these days. It's challenging, but no longer as brutal as it used to be. I even recently played every 2-character Core Set combination through NotZ, Core Set cards only, and won more often than lost (only on Standard though). Personal opinion (feel free to disagree): People have gotten better, Devourer isn't that hard, it's just perceived to be hard since everyone's first experience with it is brutal and then nobody revisits it, so the myth remains.
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Soul_Turtle
· 506
I agree with Soul_Turtle. The Devourer Below is very doable compared to some of the harder scenarios.
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Nenananas
· 273
I think blundering and dying through the Devourer Below (or throwing Lita in desparation) is a far more interesting and satisfying conclusion to a new player's introduction than the person introducing it saying "no, that level is just bad, we aren't playing it," and getting no conclusion at all. But besides that, I've managed to beat it most times I've introduced new people, and that's with using the starter decks (Nathaniel, Harvey, Jaqueline, etc.), so not especially optimised.
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SSW
· 217