No game has consumed my 2025 like The Bazaar

I’ve been writing about video games for quite a while now, but I still find it difficult to sell people on The Bazaar. At a glance, it’s an asynchronous auto-battler where you spend each day shopping for synergistic items before assembling a board to hopefully best what other players have put together. 

That description is hardly doing The Bazaar justice, and if the game already sounds complicated, that’s because it is. But it’s also the most rewarding “multiplayer” game I’ve played in years, and has monopolized my game time since I started playing it in January. 

Every time you boot up a run in The Bazaar, you pick from the game’s roster of five heroes. There’s the starter hero, Vanessa, a sea captain who specializes in aquatic/pirate-themed items and fast-firing weapons. The mascot of the game, Dooley, is all about robotic friends and building around a single item that can push your synergies in different directions, like burn or shield. Pygmalion is all about economy, stacking value on items to deal massive amounts of damage. The alchemist Mak specializes in potions and ancient relics. And finally, Stelle is a mechanic who builds powerful machines and weapons to do her bidding.

Each of these heroes has their own pool of major cards that their shops will pull from, which significantly shape the direction of their runs. However, certain rare events can give players powerful monster items or even items from other characters, allowing the best The Bazaar players to put together some incredibly diverse and interesting boards.

One of the best features of The Bazaar is its lack of a timer. You can leave the game running for as long as you’d like without needing to make a move, and you can even exit the game entirely and come back later to resume your run — a true godsend for parents. Runs are broken down into days, and each day consists of five in-game hours. Each hour you’ll pick something new to do, like go to a shop or do an in-game event.

Some shops can sell anything from your character’s card pool, but other shops are more specific, narrowing the pool to items that take up medium spaces on your board or only have specific tags like “aquatic” or “potions.” These specialized shops make finding items you need for builds you’re working toward great, but they’re far more expensive if you need to re-roll after not finding the items you want.

The goal of The Bazaar isn’t to force you into a single build that you want to play every game, but to adapt to what items your shops and events feed you. Maybe you want to build a board with a ton of weapons and just try to blitz down your opponent as fast as possible. In that case, you may want to skip the non-weapon shop to instead do an event, where you may come across a random monster and get a chance at some of its loot. On the flip side, a weapon vendor may not have much use for you if you’ve already picked up great burn items.