Nevermore - Tips & Strategies

In Nevermore, losing all your health tokens doesn’t eliminate you from the game, it turns you into a Raven.

As a Raven, you continue to play, bringing doom to others but unable to win until you regain your human form. To do that, you need to collect a hand of Five of one Suit – or One of Each Suit. It is not easy, especially if other players are monitoring what they pass you closely. But it isn’t impossible.

The tip… as a Raven you can’t gain Victory or Health and can’t attack conventionally. But you CAN gain both Light and Shadow Magicks normally. Do so. There are many cards that can help you assemble the hand you need to shed your Raven form and get back into scoring position. And while you’re at it – pass along a lot of Attack cards and let the human players beat each other down further.

As a game designer, I happen to like a few game play elements that allow for surprising reversals of fortune. Nevermore is no exception. There are four cards in the Shadow Magick deck that can lead to some fun emotional highs and lows during the game.

It is no mistake that the cards appear in the Shadow deck, which are far harder to obtain than Light Magick. But, depending on your group’s play style, you may find certain players throwing all caution to the wind to draw them with as much regularity as possible.

When this happens, there is a potential for more than one of these cards to pop up during play – and well played, they can rob a player of a win. That can be fun, but the downside is that it can also extend the length of the game. If that happens two or three times, the 45 minute game time goes out the window.

So, if you find that happening consistently in your group and wish to modulate the game time to a more usual 45 minutes or so, consider removing one or all of these cards:

Demoralize
Deny
Enfeeble (x2)

– Curt