  One of the distinctive feature of the QCD phase diagram is the possible
emergence of a critical endpoint. The critical region around the critical point
and the path dependency of the critical exponents is investigated within
effective chiral (2+1)-flavor models with and without Polyakov-loops. Results
obtained in no-sea mean-field approximations where a divergent vacuum part in
the fermion-loop contribution is neglected, are confronted to the renormalized
ones. Furthermore, the modifications caused by the back-reaction of the matter
fluctuations on the pure Yang-Mills system are discussed. Higher order,
non-Gaussian moments of event-by-event distributions of various particle
multiplicities are enhanced near the critical point and could serve as a probe
to determine its location in the phase diagram. By means of a novel derivative
technique higher order generalized quark-number susceptibilities are calculated
and their sign structure in the phase diagram is analyzed.
