  In these lectures I review some basic examples of how the concepts of
universality and scaling can be used to study aspects of the chiral and the
deconfinement transition, if not in QCD directly but in QCD-like theories. As
an example for flavor dynamics I discuss a quark-hadron model to describe the
phase diagram of two-color QCD with the functional renormalization group.
Universal aspects of deconfinement are illustrated mainly in the 2+1
dimensional SU(N) gauge theories with second order transition where many exact
results from spin models can be exploited.
