We review the properties of various hadronic phases by a pedagogical approach. We argue that the color superconducting and the meson condensation phases can be seen as extremely interesting and powerful tools for exploring the properties of hadronic matter. In particular, the meson condensation phase is realized in a regime in which various theoretical methods overlap with increasingly precise numerical lattice QCD simulations, providing insight on the properties of color confinement and of chiral symmetry breaking.