Arkham Horror LCG Battle Report: The Devourer Below (Night of the Zealot Part 3)

Disclaimer: If you haven't heard about Arhkam Horror: The Card Game, you probably might have trouble with this post. Also, potential spoilers ahead. 

Last time, I talked about how the group was starting to fall into their roles as we went through Part 2 of the Arkham Horror the Card Game Night of the Zealot mini-campaign. Well, now it’s time to talk about Part 3, the conclusion to the core box: The Devourer Below.

Just a reminder of the investigators that everyone is playing: 

Myself: Skids O'Toole 

Jimmy: Agnes Baker 

Cory: Daisy Walker 

Mike: Roland Banks 

First off, I had been trying to limit how much of my Arkham stuff I bring, so I didn’t have any of my extra cards/tokens. Well, the instructions had us add a new token to the bag, so I ended up having an extra somewhere and had to draw the token that I needed (they are in coin capsules so it made it easy). Using one of the apps for the token bag would definitely help this issue, but I’ve used that in the past and I prefer the tactile feel of pulling the tokens from the bag.

When I drew up my initial hand, pretty much had only neutral skill cards. They are fine to get later in the game, but I don’t really want them in the beginning of the game. So I mulliganed most of them. Then, based on how we did in the second part, we had to discard 2 cards at random from our hand. Well, one of the cards in my hand was Lita Chandler, and I knew that she was going to be very valuable during this game due to her stat buff. I was really nervous about her being the card that got discarded. Luckily, it ended up being something not as important.

The first two rounds of the game went really well: we moved all over the place and managed to get the large amount of clues needed to advance the first Act card by the end of Round 2. Once we figured out what the different locations cards were, we divided up and worked on the areas that we would do best at. I was starting to feel good about our chances in this game.

I forgot that we were playing Arkham Horror.

The game quickly righted the scales as the first agenda card swept by really quickly before we could even react to it. One of the things that really got to us is that we started heading to the ritual site, but all the characters that we missed in the last scenario (all 3 of them) were in our way. Then, the mythos phase dropped another couple of monsters in our path, which prevented us from moving on to the ritual site. Some of us could have skipped onwards to the ritual site, but we wanted to help our fellow investigators deal with the enemies that they had engaged with them so they didn’t get overwhelmed by them.

Another monster that didn’t help matters was a cultist that kept spawning doom tokes on them at the end of every mythos phase. We should have taken them out immediately, but they spawned far away and it was going to take took much effort to get to them. Eventually, the Umholgasdfhawhatever his name is came out. Now, we are playing with 4 players, so this thing had a TON of health. However, he has an alternate condition on him: as an action, if you toss Lita Chandler at him, the game will end and you read an alternate resolution. So now we have a difficult decision. Do we tough it out and try and take out this baddie? Or do we take the easy way out and toss Lita at him?

Since doom was quickly advancing and we had delayed in getting to the ritual site, we weren’t able to defeat the baddie unless we killed him. Also, we weren’t completely in trouble yet, we had everything managed so far. However, we really didn’t see a good chance of defeating the baddie before our time ran out. Therefore, Lita had to go. She was tossed to the monster and we ended our game. Apparently, he is satisfied with just taking Lita since she desecrated some of his ritual sites. We didn’t “win” the campaign, but we also didn’t technically “lose” the campaign either.

Thus our Night of the Zealot campaign came to a close. When I asked everyone what they thought, they really had a good time playing, and are willing to keep going and playing some of the other “full” campaigns!! Now, I have almost finished The Dunwich Legacy campaign by myself, and I wasn’t interested in going through most of those scenarios again. However, I have yet to get more than 2 to 3 scenarios into Path of Carcosa, which most people agree is one of the best ones. So I believe that will be the next campaign that we start….although if the standalone Barkham Horror scenario comes out soon, we may have to pivot to some Doggos.

Did you like this "battle report"? Have you managed to play The Devourer Below, and if so how did you do?Let me know in the comments or on twitter (twitter.com/ChrisTheProf)/facebook (facebook.com/boardsandswordspod)! Onwards to Carcosa!