A game that I have recently been addicted to has been “The Bazaar”. It fuses two of my favorite game types, namely auto-battlers and rougelikes, into one strategy driven and beautifully designed package. While a lot of the games in the auto-battler genre feel like exercises in luck, the Bazaar feels far more like a showcase of game mastery and skill. Almost any item or start can be used to create a huge combo that can be the cornerstone of your board. It is incredibly satisfying experience to uncover a new synergy or combination that has not been highlighted as the “meta” option online but still allows you to defeat the other players you face.
The drafting mechanism during the first few “days” of your Bazaar run, while vital to achieve early victories, do not lock you in to one strategy completely like many other rougelikes. The freedom to pivot or drastically change your run is almost always an option if you have planned ahead and managed your economy or experience well. What makes The Bazaar feel special to me is that these individual mechanics harmonize to create a complex exercise in self-expression; defeating another player is far more satisfying because you know you made better choices or orchestrated a better strategy than they did, not just because you stumbled upon an incredibly rare item. Every defeat is also an opportunity to learn; I always find myself asking how someone managed to utilize an item in a specific way or how they got their gold reserves so high instead of becoming angry.
