Game Review – Bazaar

Bazaar
Number of Players	2 - 6 (with 1 player option)
Play Time	30 - 45 min.
Ages	8 years and up

Bazaar is an abstract strategy game by Sid Sackson where the players are gem traders at a local bazaar trading in the market to get the gems needed to take one of the commission options.  The fewer gems you have left over when taking a commission, the more points you get for that commission.  The person with the most points at the end wins the game.

The game starts with the players setting up the market by randomly selecting two of the 10 Exchange Card and creating four piles of 5 Ware Cards each form the deck of 45 Ware Cards.

The Exchange Cards contain that market’s exchange rates for the day.  The exchange rates are represented by equations, for example:

White = Red Red

Green Green = White White

So if you have a white gem, you can trade it for two red gems.  The exchange can be made either way from the equation, so if I had two white gems I could trade them for two green gems.  There are five equations on each card for a total of 10 equations.

In the first round of the game the players roll the gem die to see what gem they start the game with.  From there each turn the player may roll the die to get a gem or use the gems they already have to trade with the market using the exchange card.  At the end of any turn a player may trade in a set of gems to get one of the Ware Cards and score victory points.  The game ends when two of the piles of Ware Cards are depleted.

I fell in love with this game the first time I played it years ago, but it was out of print at the time.  When I heard that Gryphon Games was doing a reissue of the game I was excited and picked up the first chance I got.

When I opened the box, I found it to be packaged very elegantly with everything having its place in the box.  The Exchange, Reference, and Ware cards were very sturdy and colorful and looked like they would be able to stand up to hundreds of plays.  Then I saw the gems.

The gems were not the clear colored glass stones that I had come to expect from previous issues of the game but instead looked like opaque pastel globs of industrial goo.  They were not uniform in size nor did it appear that the stones of one color were make of the same stuff or by the same manufacturer as the other colors.

The other problem that the game has is that the game is packed so well in the box there is no place to keep a small pad of paper in the box so that you have a place to keep score with the game if you take it somewhere.  I know that this is not a big problem for most people, but for someone like me who takes six or seven games from event to event, it can become an issue if, you forget the pad of lose it in transit.

Otherwise the Gryphon Games reissue of Bazaar plays as well as previous editions of the game.  The game is simple to learn, but is complex enough that it requires the you to think two or three turns ahead in order to make the correct changes to capture the cards you need to win.

The variety of Exchange and Ware Cards give it a lot of variety and makes it so you can play the game multiple times and not have it become repetitious.

I give the game an A for game play and the variety of replay options.  I give it a B for the quality of the gems that they give you in the game.  This is one of the games that you should have in your collection and fits the role of a filler game quite well.