Red November - Tips & Strategies

The event deck has one card that can raise all low-tide water to high-tide water in all compartments. If there is no flooding at the time or if all the current water is at high-tide, then this event card does nothing. If the card comes up early enough, then the water can be your friend.

The game rules state that a fire cannot start in a room that has water in it. And the event deck has plenty of fire cards in it. On the other side of the token, low tide water is pretty much harmless, with the side effect of causing an additional minute of time to move through it. If you can get low water in a number of compartments, it will reduce the likelihood of fire springing up. If the card that raises the water level has already been drawn, you can avoid pumping the water out of the cabins to circumvent most of the fire cards that might arise. Since you can’t even enter a fire room without an extinguisher or grog, this is a better trade-off in terms of surviving the crisis.

Unless you’re playing with a large group (I play usually with four to five players), the Kraken card (which is normally set aside during game set up) may seem to appear very rarely since most of the time the game is already over when event deck is reshuffled for the first time. I, myself, have never experienced Kraken attack when playing by the book.

This lead me to formulate a house rule. First, I simply tried to shuffle Kraken to the initial event deck, but this proved way unfair since the watery beast might pop up during the first few events (which is, of course, what developer tried to prevent by leaving Kraken out during set up). Next, I tried shuffling Kraken card in the last quarter of the event deck. This leaves gnomes enough time to prepare and hunt for needed equipment and makes a great finale as the gnomes struggle for survival.