Agora (2002)

Agora is a game about drawing and laying cards (acting as tiles) to form a highly abstracted Greek marketplace.

What sets the game apart from other games in the tile-laying genre is that the cards can be placed almost anywhere on the board and in almost any orientation. Cards may touch at corners. The corner of one card may touch the side of another. When placed edge-to-edge, the cards are not even required to align perfectly, only grid line to grid line.

Players advance by purchasing stores formed by the cards and collecting revenue from those stores at the beginning of each subsequent turn.

An additional random factor comes from the giving each player a letter--A, B, C or D--which activates random events if the tile they draw bears their letter.

Victory is achieved by the first player to reach 50 points.

Since revenue comes from the quality of your store, but other players can play tiles to alter that store, the overall result is a cutthroat mind-bender, making it one of the most popular games of Cheapass's Hip Pocket Games series