I keep falling off schedule. I had another good weekend of board games with family, but I still have to get into the habit of taking photos of gameplay. Most of my video gaming time has been picking away at Deltarune Chapter 4, which is definitely difficult to talk about without diving into spoilers. ( It’s GOTY material!) Another game I have been dipping into lately is much easier to talk about spoiler free.

The Bazaar is one of the newer additions to the inventory management auto-battler microgenre and it brings with it some of the most polish I’ve seen in a growing field. My personal experience with the genre starts and ends with Backpack Battles, so while I cannot recount the entire history of a genre, I can at least examine some of the compelling design decisions that make the Bazaar a game I am happy to revisit. I could continue to throw a word salad of genres and mechanics at this post, but I think it would be best to step back, and speak more plainly to what the game consists of.

In The Bazaar, you’ll progress through a series of days, each culminating with an asynchronous automated battle against another opponent who was on the same day count as you. The game continues until you have accumulated ten wins against opponents, or lost enough prestige in these combats to empty your prestige bar. A day is split into six different encounters, with a battle against an opponent as the final encounter, and a battle against a non player character in the middle. The rest of the encounters are various shops, events, and opportunities to amass gold, experience and items.

All of the events serve to make you more capable in combat, and as the genre name of autobattler suggests, combat is completely hands off. Your array of items will operate independently, each on a cooldown, triggering their abilities in hopes of eliminating the opponent before they wipe you out. Since there are no decisions to be made in the middle of combat, all of the strategy in the game are the moments that lead up to combat: Where am I placing this item on my rug? Will it synergize with the items adjacent to it? Do I have enough defensive capabilities paired with my offense?

As I mentioned earlier, I have limited exposure to this genre, but the novelty and strategy on display here is compelling, and nestles in comfortably within the confines of a day. Unsuccessful runs are likely to take less than half an hour, and since the game is asynchronous, you never have to worry that by closing the game you’ll cause someone else to have a lackluster experience. You are free to close out the game at every encounter, and come back to finish a run later at your leisure.

The production value of the game is high, with abundant voice acting and likely hundreds of bespoke art pieces. The polish is reminiscent of a blizzard product, and the game’s developer, Tempo, clearly has high ambitions for the game. The game has existed in a free to play state for some time now, but has recently had a Steam launch and a big shakeup in it’s monetization model: $20 for a starter pack of four characters, and sales of additional characters down the line. It’s shooting for the stars to become a standout live service game in a crowded field, but I think the Bazaar has the right stuff to be a compelling competitor.

The game comes with Live Service standards of cosmetics, loot boxes, and a battle pass, but I have honestly been happy to engage with the game as another game in my rotation. I don’t feel the pressure of FOMO here; I come to the Bazaar when I’m in the mood to scratch a strategic itch. I am still pretty awful at the game, but every game has been a learning opportunity, and I’m happy to keep picking away at the elegant system designed here. The game also has ambitions for a mobile launch down the line, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: The game already plays great on the Steam Deck, and this game is going to have a bright future when I can slip it into my pocket.