New Game Round-up: Build Cities, Collect Spirits, Become Death, and (Above All) Stay Cool

In Mū, you build a city composed of nine building cards, with these cards coming in five types adorned with "source symbols" for strength, faith, and food. Each edge of a building card has a semi-circle on it showing half of a source symbol. Cards also have complete symbols for strength, faith, and food on them.

Each player starts the game with two project cards — cards fueled by source tokens — and an empty 3x3 grid that shows semi-circular source symbols around the edges. The game lasts four rounds, and in each round you draft three cards. At the end of the second, third, and fourth rounds, all players compare their strengths in various horizontal or vertical rows on their grid.

In the first round, you draft three project cards, each with special effects that can be used if you fill all the source symbols on it. In each of the next three rounds, you draft and play three building cards. When you play a building card and complete one or more source symbols (by matching the colors on each half symbol), you receive a source token of that color for each completed symbol, which you must immediately place on a project.

After the third, sixth, and ninth building cards have been placed, you compare your strength in the row or column indicated on battle cards. (You have two such challenges after rounds six and nine.) The player with the most strength in the appropriate row or column receives 3 achievement points (AP), while the loser marks that row or column with a damage token. If a building card has damage in both its row and column, it's destroyed and removed from the game.

At the end of the game, players feed their city, scoring based on the number of food symbols they have and the number of non-destroyed buildings. Players also score AP for faith symbols in their city.

Mū also contains rules for a solitaire game.

There's confusion among the Yōkai!

These Japanese spirits have become intermingled in Yōkai, and to calm them, you have to group together members of the same family. They're hiding, however, so to carry out your task successfully, you have to be clever and not make any noise to avoid frightening them...

Stay Cool is easy. We ask you to do nothing complicated — but you must do it all at the same time...

When you are the active player in the first round, you must answer verbally the questions asked by your left-hand neighbor while you "write" answers to the questions asked by your right-hand neighbor, using seven letter dice to "write" three- or four-letter answers. While you're doing this, another player flips a 30-second sand timer four times, giving you two minutes to answer as many questions as possible. At the end of that time, multiply the number of answers you gave for the questions from the left and from the right to determine your score.

In the second round, you do the same thing once again with new questions, but you must tell the player watching the sand timer to flip it before it runs out of sand, with a maximum of two minutes of playing time. If you fail to tell the player to flip the timer before it runs out of sand, your turn ends immediately. However your turn ends, you score points as described above.

In the third and final round, you must do everything described in the third round except now the sand timer is hidden from your eyes!

During the game, each player will have characters in their playing area who will be born, grow, age, and enrich their personalities or acquire skills that will bring them strengths and weaknesses throughout their lives. You will see your characters live and guide them gently onto their deathbed for the liberating reap. It is by guiding your characters to their "natural death" that you will have the best chance of achieving the objectives required to get your Diploma.

You can also reap an opponent's character with reap cards as long as these cards meet the requirements — i.e., weakness symbols — present on the targeted character cards. Reaping your opponent's characters is easier, but is less rewarding because you have to share these cards with one or more of your opponents. Naturally the characters in your playing area will be targeted by others, but some cards with strength symbols will protect your character from another similar weakness symbol, so they will be be harder to reap!