The Bazaar is an asynchronous auto-battler/hero-builder by former pro-hearthstone player, Reynad! Read on to know what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if its Open Beta period is worth trying out!

The Bazaar Story Plot

If there’s a dream to chase or a fortune to seek, The Bazaar is the place to make it happen. Known across countless worlds as a land of opportunity, it welcomes everyone, from the downtrodden to the ambitious, each hoping to make a name for themselves in its bustling heart.

Within its sprawling marketplaces and specialty shops, treasures of every kind await eager hands. Here, artisans, adventurers, rogues, and the noble-hearted alike stand on equal ground, competing for influence and fame in The Bazaar’s ceaseless game of power. Yet, in this ever-shifting arena, no one knows who will ultimately claim victory.

The Bazaar Gameplay

The Bazaar is an online, multiplayer, asynchronous “Hero Builder” where the goal is to craft a board full of synergistic Items. These items serve various purposes, from dealing damage to opponents, healing your health bar, or even disabling enemy items.

Each playthrough unfolds across several days, each split into hours. Each hour presents players with three events to choose from, such as merchants selling items, monsters to battle, events to tackle, or—at the end of each day—other players’ builds to face off against.

Regardless of the outcome, each playthrough rewards players based on their performance, with prizes scaling by the number of wins against other player builds, capped at a maximum of 10 victories.

What sets The Bazaar apart from other strategy games, auto-battlers, and hero-builders like Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra, or DOTA Underlords is its asynchronous combat system. Each player’s build is recorded at certain points and later used by the game’s AI to face other players, allowing players to take as much time as they need to plan and strategize.

The Bazaar Release Date and Time

Released for Open Beta on March 5, 2025

The Bazaar entered its Open Beta phase on March 5, 2025, and is free to play through Tempo Storm’s proprietary Tempo Launcher, available through their official website.

The game is also set to release for iOS and Android devices, although a set release date for those platforms is yet to be confirmed.

Tempo Launcher

Free-to-Play

The Bazaar Review [Open Beta]

For Paying Customers Only

The Bazaar is a game I’ve had my eye on for what feels like an eternity. As a seasoned Hearthstone vet who may or may not be a little jaded from the game’s downward spiral over the years, I was craving something fresh to satisfy my thirst for strategy and deck-building goodness. Enter The Bazaar, which seemed to promise just that—if you squint hard enough and embrace its quirky mechanics.

The closed beta looked super promising. I mean, even my favorite Hearthstone influencers—like Kripparian—took a swing at it and fell head over heels. Naturally, I hopped on that bandwagon, holding my breath for the Open Beta. Which, surprise surprise, got delayed way longer than I anticipated.

And now, it’s finally here—ripe for the taking, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve been robbed. Sure, it’s free-to-play, but there’s a battle pass now (wasn’t there before?), the meta has morphed from what I remember, and I’m left searching for the version of The Bazaar I saw those months ago.

Before I dive too deep into the swamp of disappointment, I decided to give it a fair shot anyway. And, honestly, if there’s one silver lining here, at least the game didn’t cost me a penny. So let’s break this too-little-too-late, not-quite-a-Hearthstone-wannabe down and see what it’s really all about.

The Most Unique Auto-battler You’ll Ever Find

Before diving into the messy bits, it’s worth breaking down The Bazaar at its core—because for all my comparisons to Blizzard’s least-favorite money printer, this game actually marches to the beat of its own drum.

At its heart, The Bazaar feels less like a competitive strategy game in the vein of Hearthstone and more like an interactive board game with a heavy dose of economic tinkering. You’re not meticulously crafting a deck to outmaneuver opponents in real time. Instead, you’re wheeling and dealing—buying, selling, and scaling various items to create the strongest, most ridiculous combo imaginable. And while you are technically facing off against real players, you’re not actually playing against them directly. Thanks to the game’s asynchronous PvP, you’re battling “ghosts” of their builds, which essentially function as tougher-than-usual boss fights at the end of each in-game day.

Between battles, you’ll be scouring the Bazaar for items, discovering synergies, and tweaking your build by upgrading stats like damage, shields, healing, and cooldowns. Various NPCs act as vendors and specialists, each offering different ways to power up your setup. Your ultimate goal? Win enough times to earn rewards and climb the ranks—until you run out of Prestige, the precious resource lost every time an opponent smacks you down.

This is, of course, a grotesquely oversimplified version of what actually goes on in The Bazaar, but it’s all you need to survive your first few rounds. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever played before—and it could have been a breath of fresh air if the rest of the game followed through with the same new ideas. Spoilers, it did not. In fact, not only does it unearth the worst thing you could ask for in a free-to-play title—a tired, unwanted fad of a monetization scheme that only killed more titles than it uplifted—it somehow made it worse.

In theory, winning streaks reward you with chests, which contain cosmetic upgrades for certain cards, alongside flashy new looks for your character, battlefield, and card backs. The more wins you rack up, the more chests you unlock, and the feedback loop should keep you hooked.

Except, well… The Bazaar hits a massive roadblock when it comes to its monetization and progression, preventing the feedback loop from ever starting. For a game built entirely around finding the perfect synergy, its progression system somehow manages to be the most anti-synergistic thing about it.

The Dreaded Battle Pass Model Rears Its Ugly Head Once More

One thing that really stood out to me about The Bazaar is just how hard it plateaus once you run out of tickets for ranked mode. And trust me, you will run out of tickets. Fast.

See, ranked mode is the only way to actually earn rewards. Free Play? That’s just a glorified practice mode where wins mean absolutely nothing—unless you count progress toward your daily and weekly missions, which, in theory, should help keep the grind going.

But here’s the kicker: those missions don’t actually reward you with anything useful. The EXP they grant only levels up your battle pass, and if you’re expecting that to shower you with freebies, think again. The battle pass basically has zero free rewards, none that are immediately wowing, at least.

So, you start with a handful of ranked tickets, burn through them before you can blink, and then what? Good question! The game sure doesn’t tell you—except for a very convenient little redirect to the in-game store. Once those tickets are gone, you’re stuck in Free Play purgatory for a while, earning nothing while staring longingly at the rewards locked behind ranked mode.

And what about unlocking new heroes and playstyles? Surely, there’s a way to earn them, right? Well, technically, yes—you just need gems. And how do you get gems? By opening chests. And how do you get chests? By playing ranked mode or by earning one every few days through the battle pass. And how do you play ranked mode? By using tickets. And how do you get more tickets? You get a measly few with every level of the battle pass.

I'd call it a reward if it guaranteed you some sort of return, but these tickets aren't worth anything unless you're good at the game to begin with, and good luck finding the motivation to keep playing if more opportunities to get kicked in the teeth are your only reward.

So, yes, The Bazaar does have a feedback loop after all—just not the fun, rewarding kind. Instead, it’s an aggressively anti-F2P cycle that ensures you hit a paywall faster than you can say, “Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be free-to-play?”

Can’t Deny the Production Value

It genuinely pains me to dig into The Bazaar like this because, at its core, it’s a fantastic game with brilliant ideas and top-tier production value across the board. Despite the lack of a proper story mode, the game’s setting is incredibly compelling, and its cast of characters is as charming as they are diverse.

The game doesn’t just settle for decent presentation—it goes all out. Every cutscene is fully voice-acted, and even the smallest interactions are packed with personality, from pre-battle snark to win-and-loss quotes, all the way to a final line at the end of each run to wrap everything up. The art style nails that sweet spot between cartoony and visually striking, and that’s before even mentioning the gorgeous card art and cosmetic designs.

If you’re looking for a vibrant world teeming with bustling crowds, intricate character relationships, and a sense of day-to-day life, The Bazaar delivers on all fronts. It’s a universe that wants to pull you in—it just doesn’t always make it easy to stay.

Asynchronous PvP is Something I Didn’t Know I Needed

It’s kind of wild how different asynchronous PvP feels compared to the fast-paced, high-stakes decision-making we’re used to in games like Hearthstone, League of Legends, or DOTA. In those, you’re constantly reacting, adapting, and making split-second calls to stay ahead. But in The Bazaar? You’ve got all the time in the world—literally. There’s no ticking clock between fights, no pressure to hurry through decisions. The only real concern is identifying your build’s weaknesses and figuring out how to patch them up.

This asynchronous approach grants The Bazaar a rare kind of strategic freedom. Time isn’t a resource you have to spend wisely—it’s irrelevant. You can step away mid-run, ranked or otherwise, and come back whenever you feel like it. Your board state is saved, your opponents remain locked in place like ghosts from the past, and nothing moves forward unless you decide it does.

From what I could experience in Free Play, this freedom felt refreshing. I didn’t need to keep my eyes peeled for every micro-movement or anticipate a sudden turn of events. I could plan out every aspect of my build before I even started, then refine it mid-run without the usual mental gymnastics required by live PvP. Of course, this kind of system isn’t for every game—there’s a reason real-time competition is so engaging. The constant tension, the ever-changing battlefield, the thrill of responding at the moment—those things are hard to replace.

But for The Bazaar? This system fits like a custom glove.

The Bazaar is Decidedly NOT Free-to-Play

And so, here we are at the end—wiser, a little more jaded, and fully aware of why The Bazaar feels like a completely different game from the one I glimpsed during the Closed Beta back in 2024. Back then, access was limited to those who could afford the privilege of paying for a beta. Now that it’s gone fully free-to-play, all the bells and whistles I once envied from afar have been unceremoniously swapped out for the cold, hard reality of yet another battle pass.

And Tempo isn’t even pretending to be subtle about it. If you don’t cough up cash, you get nothing but the most basic, bare-bones experience. I’d sooner personally redevelop Star Wars Battlefront from scratch than hand them a single penny. This game is not free-to-play, no matter what the price tag says.

Too much of The Bazaar is locked behind that dreaded paywall, leaving too little for the average player to enjoy. I can only hope—pray, even—that this is just a temporary evil, a necessary sacrifice to keep development going until full release. Maybe, one day, I’ll see the game I was so excited for all those months ago, freed from the chains of predatory monetization.

But until that day comes, The Bazaar is mostly for paying customers only.

Game8 Reviews

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The Bazaar Product Information

Title	THE BAZAAR
Release Date	March 5, 2025 (Open Beta)
Developer	Tempo Storm
Publisher	Tempo Storm
Supported Platforms	PC (Tempo Launcher)
Genre	Card, Strategy
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	RP
Official Website	The Bazaar Website

Aaron Bruce Albert..

A massive fan of roguelikes, turn-based RPGs, and open world adventure games. His gold standard games include The Binding of Isaac, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Dragon Quest Monsters Joker.