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It is impossible to get a naval fleet from Japan to America or visa-versa in one turn. So, if you’re not interested in invading at the moment, but don’t want to be overrun; instead of getting into a race to develop the biggest navy simply bulk up on bombers and fighters. Not only are they less expensive to produce, but they have a longer range and since the ships can’t get there in one turn you’ll have at least one shot at them before they can even reach you.
You probably want to have some navy so they can’t just drop troops and attack in one turn, but will have to kill off your navy first. Plus this will give your planes a second shot at them.
This lets you defend your backdoor while committing most of your resourses elsewhere.

The talk like a pirate rule says you can draw and play an extra card if you talk like a pirate on your turn. However you can draw and play two extra cards if you’ve been talking like a pirate since your previous turn. When the card gets played everyone starts talking like a pirate, but you can’t get both cards unless you’ve been doing it since your previous turn. This card is a whole lot of fun so it rarely doesn’t get played. So, if you’re up for it, talk like a pirate the whole game, then whenever it comes up you are the only one who’ll get both of the plays and draws on the first time around. Plus it’s just fun to talk like a pirate anyway.

Most the time if you’re going to win it’s going to be on your turn. Since the goals change so quickly it’s hard to get the keepers you need to meet the current goal. You’re better off holding onto the goal you have a chance of completing. Since no one knows what goal you are going for, and since you keepers don’t match the current goal they won’t go out of their way to steal your keepers. Then when it is your turn play your goal that you already have the keepers for and comence bragging on your win.

When you have a lot of people playing it can be extremely difficult to get to level ten because everyone has cards that can assure that you don’t beat your last monster. When this begins to happen the games can drag on too long.
Usually when a person dies they lose everything and start over. In college we would play with the rule that if the game stretched past midnight if someone was killed they were eleminated from the game. People then begin to use their cards to try to eleminate people and those cards get used up faster making it easier to beat that final monster. It also adds a fun twist when you hit your time limit and realize that death is now final.

One of the fun features of being a wizard in this game is that you may discard your hand and make the monster disappear. While you don’t go up a level for doing this you do get the monster’s treasures.
If you are fighting a monster with a significant amount of treasures play any one time use cards you may have to add levels to the monster (these cards give extra treasures when the monster is defeated), discard the rest of your hand to make it disappear and you now have a new hand of nothing but treasure.
This won’t advance your level, but it will help you build up your arsenal for the next monster.