New Game Round-up: Magicians Practice Vudù, Robots Rescue Jupiter & Attack Wing Moves from SF to F

Ancient sorcery, dark omens and endless curses — you will become one of the adepts of the dark magic of the Egyptians or a follower of the ancient art of the Badly-Dead Druids or an arcane sorcerer of Vudù rituals! Prepare yourselves for the biggest dispute of black magic ever. The Vudù tournament has just begun!

In Vudù, the players act as the most wicked and malicious sorcerers of all time, and they want to use their curses and black magic to make the lives of their enemies impossible to prevail over them! Each turn, you roll five dice, collect your ingredients, then choose whether to take new cards, take new items, or cast a spell. Each spell has a powerful and tricky curse attached to it that forces your target to play in a specific way, for example, talking with his tongue out for the rest of the game, or using only a single hand, or running around the table each turn. Each curse grants you points when you cast it and many more points if your target forgets to obey it or becomes too exhausted to continue. Collect as many malediction points as you can to reach the final tile of the scoreboard before anyone else!

You're a team of lowly maintenance robots built to keep the space station operational and clean so that the colonists can get on with...whatever it is they do. Unfortunately, the station has been invaded by creeps, alien creatures that slowly advance toward food (the colonists) so that they can multiply. The only thing keeping the colonists from being completely wiped out is your knowledge of the station, a couple of specialty tools and abilities unique to each of you, and a little bit of problem-solving code installed so you could do your jobs efficiently.

Jupiter Rescue is a co-operative strategy game in which players work together to escort 28 colonists to an escape pod before they're converted into alien creeps. Each turn, players may take five actions, choosing from common options — moving themselves, moving nearby colonists, or killing alien creeps — and a series of programming cards that grant them special abilities. These cards can be played on the player's turn to activate the ability. Each player also gets to choose one card to be his "core" ability, letting him use it every turn instead of discarding it.

New creeps are added to the board, which is composed of tiles, at the end of each player's turn by rolling a die; if a tile fills up with creeps, it's destroyed and removed from the game. Players lose if enough colonists get turned into creeps, or if certain key board tiles are all destroyed. Double-sided tiles allow for hundreds of station variations.