Ever wondered what it's like to compete as a merchant in an ancient Greek marketplace? Of course not. But trust us, it's exactly like this. Agora is a fine little tile game in the Hip Pocket series, featuring the unique mechanic that you can play a card anywhere on the table and in any orientation. The resulting board is so organic you'd swear you were in ancient Greece.

Game Synopsis: Players take turns collecting income and constructing shops. You only make money if pedestrians can reach your shop, so if you wind up completely surrounded by new construction your income drops to zero. Watch out if you own the biggest store on the table: it's likely to burn down or be destroyed in a sudden, freakish, and highly surgical flood. On the other hand, the biggest shop probably stands to make a bundle from the festivals that happen suddenly from time to time.

Ting Ting is not boxed and she contains no rulebook. Ting Ting has one unique card, the Wild Block, as well as a very competitive assortment of Hits, Clears, and Doubles.

Note: This version of Ting Ting will be unique in its design even if we do a Ting Ting deck in the Shadowfist expansion. In case that matters.

BRAWL is a real time card game played at high speed. Each deck is a different character with a unique mix of cards, and each player needs a different deck to play.

It's the Old West, and you find yourselves working at Friedey's, the watering hole of the damned.

You're the last few players in a poker game you're not allowed to win.

Now lose all your money as fast as you can, while everybody else is trying to do the same. Oh, and you'll probably need the Brain.

Dead Money is the newest game in the Friedey's series (Give Me the Brain, Lord of the Fries, and The Great Brain Robbery). It's a wacky cross between poker and Give Me The brain.

Girl Genius, a fabulous comic series by Phil Foglio, is now available from Studio Foglio, at www.studiofoglio.com. Girl Genius: The Works is the companion card game by James Ernest Games. The Works contains a 108-card deck in glorious full color. Game Synopsis: The players are tinkering with a big machine made of all the characters and machines in the world. The machine is a board made of twelve cards, and players take turns flipping and spinning these cards trying to fix the machine. When you make the right moves you "pop" pieces out of the machine and keep them, and you might even cause a chain reaction that pops several more pieces at once.

Attention, Zombies: After far too long a wait, the color edition of Give Me The Brain is finally here. It's more spectacularly beautiful than you can possibly imagine, with full color cards, fifteen new bid cards by Brian Snoddy, and a bunch of new goodies like the Dog Brain, the Mop, and the Piece of String. Come back to Friedey's and see how Cheapass Games made the best card game of 1997 even better.

Light Speed is a lightning-fast card game of space combat about identical teams of spaceships dropping out of hyperspace to do battle over an extremely important asteroid. This game is fast: each round takes less than a minute to play! (With a few minutes to score.)

Tom Jolly, master game designer, brings us this fast-paced space combat game for 2-4 players. Each player has just 10 ships to play as quickly and strategically as he can. Once a player has run out of ships, the playing round ends and the shooting begins. Fast ships shoot first, big ships shoot last, and whoever scores the most points wins! A thrilling real-time card game in full color, a first for Hip Pocket games.

You Need: For 2 Player Games: About 30 counters in two different colors.

For 3 or 4 Players: About 15 distinct counters for each player (blue, green, purple and red) and an additional 15 counters in a fifth color.

Nexus is an abstract strategy game about building, controlling, and capturing Nexuses. A Nexus is made of Connectors and Nodes, and, well, it all makes sense when you play it. The game is printed on sturdy white cardstock in brilliant blue and gray.

Game Synopsis: Players take turns drawing one card and immediately adding it to the layout (there is no hand). After you add a card, you can place a stone on any unoccupied node (the round things) in an incomplete nexus (a set of links and nodes). When a Nexus is complete, the player who controls the most power in the nexus scores points for the unoccupied nodes. The first player to reach the target score wins the game. It's the essential abstract Hip Pocket Game, brazenly about nothing and well worth the time.

Elements: Cards, Rulebook. You Need: 1 Pawn for every player and 10 counters per player.

Travel to distant lands, meet exotic animals, and kill them. That’s the basis of this simple little tile game, in which both players must build a map and then race to score the point cards. Safari Jack was originally released as a black-and-white Cheapass Game, but the lack of color made it less than appealing. Now re-worked in a color form, Safari Jack looks good and plays even better.

If you would like to play Safari Jack with more than two players, there really aren’t enough cards in just one deck. That’s why it's only listed as a 2-player game, if you’d like to include up to 4 players you can do it by adding a second deck.

Secret Tijuana Deathmatch is a card game featuring clever strategy, funny wrestlers, and components from another game! Players take the roles of Mexican wrestling promoters, cajoling bankrupt and suicidal American businessmen into fighting in midnight deathmatches. The game begins with each player drafting a stable of five fighters, and plays out over several rounds as these fighters meet, fight, and die.

In the year 2185, in the steam-driven titanium mine deep under the surface of Io,.... oh, who are we kidding. Steam Tunnel is a great game with no particular basis in reality. Compete for control of tunnels in an abstract game with a perfect mix of strategy and luck.

Battle for control of tunnels in this purely abstract strategy card game by James Ernest. On a wrap-around board made of 36 cards, players flip and capture cards that show sets of tunnels. Connect high-scoring end-caps to score points. The longer your tunnel, the better. A truly engaging strategy game with a lot more involved than you think.

You Need: About 20 distinct counters for each player and a method to keep score.

Congratulations! You’ve just invented “Flammable Beer.” Your work has just begun.

The Big Idea is a hilarious game of inventing and investing, where players try to market wacky products like Erotic Chowder and Mentholated Shampoo. Sound easy? Maybe that’s because you’ve never had to come up with the perfect sales pitch for the Non-Stick Toupee.

In this remake of a classic Cheapass game, players create amusing products using descriptions like “Flying” and “Herbal” and items like “Robot” and “Monkey.” You could create Mail-Order Clown Pants, Electric Cat Sushi, or even Gigantic Addictive Chicken Cleaner. Do you think you’re the marketing whiz who can talk the public into a Perforated Kilt? Then you’re ready to play The Big Idea.

Multiply your invention potential from jillions to gazillions.

The Big Idea: More Cards is a deliciously different assortment of 64 cards for The Big Idea, featuring such gems as Dangerous Cheese, Bulletproof Caveman, and Scandalous Turkey Pants.

You need The Big Idea (semi-deluxe edition) and all the required bits for that game.

James Ernest’s Totally Renamed Spy Game is a long-awaited remake of one of out best-selling games of all time. We’d tell you what it was once called, but we’d rather not get another letter. The new edition has glorious full-color artwork, high-quality production values, and the improved game mechanics you’ve come to expect from James Ernest’s color upgrades.

Players take the roles of super-villains, earning points by luring secret agents into their dastardly lairs, taunting them with deadly devices, and then killing them. Sure, you could kill a spy without taunting him, but he’s not worth nearly as many points. It hardly matters that he will destroy everything if he escapes. You’ll still have time to build another mysterious island.

Europe. Summer. 1997. You and your friends have discovered two problems with a common solution: Mad Cows in England and Unexploded Bombs in France. You've decided to bring these two powderkegs together just to see what happens. And you wouldn't say "no" to a little money on the side. So round up your herd, march them through France, and set them loose behind the Cordon Rouge. If you're lucky you'll come home rich before Greenpeace gets hold of you. Either way, there's something magical about blowing up cows.