Petrified or slain
Micro Medusa is a 1-2 players game of confrontational tile placement. You play either as the Champion, trying to defeat the Medusa, or as the Medusa, trying to turn the Champion into stone. It will launch on Kickstarter on October 12.
The game starts with the tile featuring Medusa's head laid down on the table. Each round, the Medusa, who begins with one tile in hand, drafts two more tiles from a public display of four. Then, the Champion drafts one available piece of equipment and adds it to their inventory, which is already furnished at the beginning of the game. All pieces of equipment of the Champion are known to both parties.
Next, the Medusa secretly chooses one of the two tiles she drafted and plays it face-down adjacent to a formerly laid down Medusa tile. The Champion plays a piece of equipment to react to that tile. The Medusa tile is then revealed. There are three kinds of Medusa types: snake, snakehead, eyeball. An eyeball reduces the health of the Champion by one: all three eyeballs turn him into stone. You also win if you successfully play three snakeheads. Finally, if you manage to connect three snake tiles to either a snakehead or an eyeball, you also win.
But the Champion can meddle with these plans. If the piece of equipment matches the medusa tile (a blade for a snakehead, a torch for a snake tile, a shield for an eyeball), the tile is either flipped, blocking the growth of the monster, or in the case of snakeheads, severed once and for all. If the Champion severs three heads or entirely prevents further growth, he wins. He also wins when the Medusa runs out of tiles. If there is no match, then the Champion resets his inventory to what it was at the beginning of the game.
In solo, you either play as the Champion or the Medusa. No details have yet been given with respect to how the enemy is automatically played in that case.
The solo rules have been posted on BGG.
Hmmm... It's not ringin' my bell too loudly. In the 2nd picture, the tiles look all beat-up.