New Game Round-up: Put Demons to Work, Manipulate Markets, and Float Like a Dandelion

Who will become the next demon king? In Demon Worker, you send demons with special abilities to the human world, weapons factory, and other locations to collect resources efficiently, with both humans and weapons being examples of those resources.

With these resources, you can summon new demons and create impulse points — and whoever ends up with the most impulse points will claim the demon throne.

All players co-operate, trying to put down cards of the same color in the same order. When the lead player says a word from a subject card, what color do you think matches that? Everyone has their own ideas, so things might get confused — and the color cards are placed face-down, so who knows what to think? When all the players have placed five of their cards face-down, the cards are turned up and checked. If the cards all have the same color in the same order, all players win!

The game can be played at different skill levels, and as you play, the game gets harder.

In 相場操縦 (Market Manipulation), each player secretly represents a company, with as many companies in the game as the number of players. Each company in the game has a deck of eight tiles, with point values on the back of these tiles.

The start player in a round draws one tile from each company, looks at the point values for each of them, discards one from play, then places the others in a column with some of them above the break-even line (a thick string) and others below. Each other player in turn either moves one tile from the top of the column to the bottom (or vice versa) while keeping the column in the same position relative to the break-even line or moves the column up or down by one level. The starting player for the round does this action last, then this position rotates clockwise, and the next starting player begins another round.

After eight rounds, the game ends and the point values of all tiles above the break-even line are revealed. The player who owns the company with the highest collective value wins!

In Animale Tattica, players race to empty their hand first.

Each player has a different deck of sixteen cards. Usually you have to play cards with a higher rank than those played by the previous player, but if you've collected cards of the same rank and the total of that rank equals the total of the rank that previous player played, you can play those cards instead.

In タンポポ (Dandelion), you are a lone dandelion growing on a solitary island surrounded by the sea. You must blossom from a seed until you're ready to spread seeds of your own, trying to wrest control of the weather from other players so that you can blow on the wind and reach the promised land — and victory — before anyone else.