Agora Clarification

Agora.
Agora is another clever tile-laying game that's enjoyable. You draw a tile, check if any rewards (festivals) or disasters (fire and flood) strike, then place the tile representing shops divided up in different ways, and buy one if you'd like. Income is based on access to shops and you and opponents spend time cutting off shops, or expanding shops. Expanding shops could be detrimental because disasters strike only the biggest shops. Overall, we caught on that it's better to keep a tie for shop sizes to prevent disasters and create shops with the highest scoring opportunities. We played a game for twenty minutes.

I had a question about the rules and received a response from the man himself.

Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2002 09:49:32 -0800
From: "James Ernest" 
Organization: Cheapass Games
Subject: Re: Agora

Vitas Povilaitis wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I just received Agora and read through the rules.  I noticed a
> contridiction in the rules.  Under Fire: "Fire removes from the table all
> cards that are part of that shop, even those cards with no counters on
> them."  However, under Buy One Shop: "Some parts of your shop may not have
> stones on them...they don't count against you for Fires..."
> 
> Which did you mean the rules to say?
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Vitas Povilaitis

The rules are correct, though perhaps unclear.

The cards which are part of a shop but have no counters on them -are-
removed by a fire. When I say they don't "count against you for fires" I
mean that they don't add to the size of a shop for the purpose of
determining which shop is the biggest, and thus which shop will be
destroyed by fire.

Hope this makes it more clear.

-James Ernest
-Cheapass Games