New Game Round-up: Yedo Comes to France and the U.S., Anthony Rubbo: Renaissance Man & Sheep in Spaaaaaaaaace!

In Renaissance Man, each player is an example of the title character – skilled as a scholar, a merchant, a knight, and a baker – and throughout the game will hire, recruit and train others with the goal of producing a Master of one of these four areas of study. Each round consists of players creating actions by combining a worker in play with a card from hand:

• Merchants hire new workers.
• Knights compete to recruit workers from the common pool.
• Bakers offer their goods in exchange for workers' actions.
• Scholars train others in the ways of the Renaissance Man.

Instead of providing these actions for a player, a worker in play can be assigned to support higher-level workers. Two workers are required for support, and they are laid out as such in a pyramid-fashion. Five workers create a player's foundation, and the first player to complete a pyramid structure of fifteen workers creates a single Master of study, thus winning the game. A little luck will help along the way, but the day will surely go to the player who finds the most clever ways out of the trickiest situations in Renaissance Man!

Space Sheep! is a real-time, customizable, cooperative game – with possible traitor(s) in your midst – for 1-8 players. The Defenders want to get the Space Sheep tokens and Shepherd tokens back to their matching Systems before all the cards are gone and time has run out. (If playing with Infiltrators, thus making the game semi-cooperative, each player receives a secret allegiance card; each player knows only her own allegiance, leaving her to guess and decipher who else is on her team.) On her turn, each player will play a card from her hand, allowing her to:

• Activate a System and take the action associated with it (moving the Space Sheep and Shepherds),
• Play a card to move a Shepherd clockwise, or
• Play any card face down to the Defense Mat.

Additionally, a player may play a card matching the System occupied by the Wolf to attack (and knock the Wolf token on its side).

One player acts as the Supreme Flock Commander, managing the one-minute sand timer. If the sand runs out, Wolf attacks and players must discard cards from the Defense Mat, the deck, or their hands; if they can't, they lose the game. If the Wolf token has been knocked on its side, the Supreme Flock Commander may flip the sand timer before it runs out to avoid the Wolf attack, standing up the Wolf token and moving it to another System in the process.

Players who are Infiltrators will, of course, be attempting to delay action, make poor moves, and subtly manipulate the other players into making poor choices of their own. At any time players may point at one another in an accusatory fashion. If more than half the players simultaneously point at one player, this player is out of the game. He then reveals his Allegiance and:

• If players have found an Infiltrator, shuffle the player's cards in hand and place them on the bottom of the deck.
• If players have found a Defender, place the player's cards in hand on the face-down discard pile. On the ousted player's turn, Wolf attacks.

If the Defenders get all shepherds and space sheep to their matching systems, then they win the game. If the sand timer runs out and players can't discard enough cards – or if the number of Infiltrators matches the number of Defenders in the game – then the Infiltrators win. Players can customize Space Sheep! by varying the number of Systems in play (more Systems = more complexity), the number of tactic cards in the deck (fewer cards = greater difficulty), the strength of Wolf, the ratio of Infiltrators to Defenders, and the types of direction cards (more directions = greater variability).