Players: 3-5
Playing Time: 60-75 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

Components

Desert Bazaar comes with:

• 1 game board
• 60 tent tiles
• 60 cards
• 3 resource dice
• 35 tent markers
• 5 score markers

Game Board: A small linen-textured board that depicts a hexagon made up of hexes, 6 on a side. It's unfortunately been folded in four, which for a board this size means it doesn't lay flat well.

Tent Tiles: 60 hex tiles, each of which depicts a colored tent (red, blue, purple, or green) and shows above it a three-part flag which defines the three resources required to build it (again, red, blue, purple, or green).

Cards: 15 cards each depicting the 4 resources of the game: red camels, blue water, purple silk, or green spice. They're half-sized cards of medium weight that are linen-textured.

Resource Dice: Plastic dice with inset stickers showing colors (the 4 resource colors, a multi-colored wild side, and a "dead" desert side).

Other Plastic Bits: Each player also gets 7 cap-shaped markers which represent tents and 1 square marker which is used for scoring. They're all produced from clear plastic. Some of the players, used to wood bits found in most hobbyist games, didn't like the plastic bits at all, but I personally found them pretty and evocative on the board. However, I did find the shapes a bit odd. The "tents" looked more like igloos, and the scoring markers had weird circular insets in them. They felt like they came from some other game.

Rulebook: A short 4-page rulesheet in full-color with examples and a nice quick-reference chart at the end. It's even linen-textured.

Unfortunately colors were a notable problem across several of the components. The matches betwene the tents and the cards that are used to build those tents were terrible. Red was the worst, since it was paired up with brown cards, but the greens were also much darker on the cards than the pieces.

Some players had trouble distinguishing between the blue and purple tents, which just looked dark. Further, just about everyone had troubles figuring out which tent flags were blue and which were green when they were viewed in isolation. Finally, there were issues between the green and blue cards; I know I personally started looking at the artwork for each card when I tried to remember what was what, because the colors didn't help.

None of these color issues stopped us from playing the game, but some people did try and play the wrong cards at various times, and players had to constantly struggle to differentiate colors throughout the game (moreso when we played at my house under regular nighttime house lighting than when we play at a local gamestore under a combination of daylight and bright florescents).

Overall the components for Desert Bazaar are of average to good quality and of average beauty, but color issues cause notable usability problems. The theming is also pretty weak, with neither the components nor the gameplay feeling particularly evocative of Desert Bazaars. Combining all that together I've given Desert Bazaar just a high "3" out of "5" for Style: slightly above average, and that on the basis of the component quality and in spite of usability issues.

The Gameplay

The object of Desert Bazaar is to most efficiently place tents to score the most victory points through careful resource (and time) management.

Setup: Each player chooses a color and takes the tents and score marker in that color.

The board is laid out and 8 tent tiles are laid out near it, 4 to each side of the board.

Each player rolls 9 resource dice and takes the indicated 9 resource cards.

Order of Play: On his turn a player either rolls for additional resources or builds tents.

Rolling for Resources: First the active player draws one resource card of his choice.

Then he rolls the 3 resouce dice. These 6-sided dice each show the four resources plus a wild side plus a desert side.

After rolling the dice the player may opt to take only one of the resource types depicted, but he can take as many of the resource as are shown (from 1-3).

In addition if he wants he can reroll all but one of the non-desert dice, trying to get additional resources of the type he saved. If he succeeds this will allow him to take more resources of the type he wants. If he fails, then he gets nothing.

Building Tents: Alternatively the active player may build tents. There are eight tents out, but divided into two sets of four. A player may only build tents from one of the sets on his turn.

Each tent costs three resources to build: either one each of three different resources or else two of one resource plus one of another. These costs are depicted on flags flying overhead the tents. These costs may be paid through cards from the player's hand or through tents adjacent to where the player builds his new tent. It's possible for a tent placement to be free if tents of all the appropriate colors are all adjacent to where the player wants to build.

A player marks the tent tile with one of his tent markers when he places it. These will later be redeemed for points, and thus if the player runs out of tent markers, he won't be able to get points.

If a player starts a new encampment (meaning there are no adjacent tents to his new one) he immediately earns 2 points. An encampment may never become more than 7 tents in size (through either addition or combination of previously distinct encampments).

When a player places the 7th tent in an encampment he immediately gets 1 point. Then every tent marker in that encampment earns its player 1 points (meaning, overall, that the first tent is worth 3 points, the 2nd through 6th 1 points, and the 7th 2 points).

A player may continue to place tents as long as he has the cards to do so. If he uses up the four tent tiles in the set he's working on, he immediately replenishes those 4, but must continue building from the same side.

Ending the Game: The game ends when it's not possible to build any more tents (due to the 7-tent encampment limit). At this point every remaining tent marker on the board earns its owner a point.

Each player also has an opportunity to earn points for the cards in his hand. Whoever has the most of each color of card earns 2 bonus points.

The winner is the player with the most points.

Relationships to Other Games

Desert Bazaar is a resource management game that uses formulaic construction. It's thus reminescent of Settlers of Catan, but even moreso Attika, another game that reduces formulaic costs for on-board resources.

I think that successful formulaic resource games depend on their formulas being obvious and easy to remember. Settlers does a good job of this: which resources you use to make which things sort of makes sense, and moreso are easy to remember. Attika is a little more difficult because the formulas don't seem quite as connected to reality, and there's so many of them that you have to play quite a bit before they come naturally.

The resource-management formulas in Desert Bazaar are essentially random. There's no rhyme or reason to which colors are used to build which tents. This unfortunately undercuts the theming of the game and also makes it that much harder to play.

The Game Design

Whenever I write a review of a game I try and figure out which audience it's being directed at, then try and assess how well the game serves that audience. For Desert Bazaar I'm pretty sure the game is directed toward families and other casual players who may or may not have ever seen a game beyond Monopoly. Unfortunately I'm pretty unable to measure whether the game serves them or not because I'd have to make a logical jump toward looking at this game from an utterly non-gamist point of view, and this game has too many analytical elements, and thus I can't.

The game is very open to analysis, allows a lot of opportunity for it, and definitely rewards players who analyse. This isn't just about "analysis paralysis", because out of the half-dozen or so gamers who I saw play this game, virtually none of them were willing to play blindly, without figuring out their best moves beforehand--and when subjected to that scrutiny the game largely falls apart.

This all comes back to those tents that you're building, and their three-part flags. At any time, as you decide whether to take a building turn or not, you have to look at the 8 face-up tents, figure out how they could be built in numerous different configurations (because tents you place can affect the resources available for other tents you place), and you have to consider it all not just arithmetically, but also geometrically. This results in lots of considering and reconsidering that's on the one hand really necessary for good play and on the other hand really slows things down.

Beyond that I found the logistical elements of the game overly obvious and not well-balanced.

For example, because there's no limit on holding cards, the best option is usually to roll the dice and take new cards. Taking a build turn costs you (deferred) resources, and thus future tent-building opportunities, and thus victory points, so you want to do it as little as possible--up to the point where you decide that you must take your turn lest you not have the opportunity to use your resources at all. So one of the best strategies is to wait and wait and wait, which isn't terribly fun.

Another logistical imbalance has to do with the cost of building tents. Each tent has a cost of 0-3 cards and (ultimately) earns you 1-3 victory points. Clearly you want to carefully manage that ratio of cards/victory points. Unfortunately (for clever gameplay) a 1:1 ratio is extremely easy to arrive at. You build a tent on its own and you eventually get 3 VPs for 3 cards. Now, you can achieve or even better this ratio if you're very clever about the use of on-board resources and the final-tent bonus, but it's hard and it's rare. Conversley most other moves that look clever, like playing the second card in an encampment with one onboard resource for 2 cards, are actually game losers, because you end up with a 2:1 ratio. (The ultimate strategy for building out an encampment turns out to be to build a standalone, then build another standalone, then build a tent between them that uses both their colors, for a total of a 7:7 ratio, and if you were very clever or lucky you can put a fourth tent in among then for free, making your ratio 7:8.)

After two games, I don't think there's necessarily a game-breaking strategy along these lines, but it's clearly a game-playing-really-well strategy and it's alternatively dull and pretty monotone.

Before I close up here I'll list one last issue: downtime. This downtime is largely caused by the need to very carefully figure out possibilities for building on your turn. This is made worse by the chaos implicit in the game: the board changes a lot from one turn to the next. As a result the downtime feels high: you do genuinely have to wait for a player on his turn because he needs to figure out what to do given the game's layout at that very moment, but at the same time you'll be relatively bored while waiting because what your opponents are doing really doesn't matter to you (a common issue with high chaos games).

Now, all of the above is from a gamist point of view. I can't imagine a gamer playing the game different, and as a result I think it's a failure for that demographic. The analysis required for good gameplay is too intricate and too unbalanced. Conversely I can't really comprehend of the demographic who could play this game without doing that analysis. Do this exist? Probably. Are they the people reading this review? Probably not.

As a result for Desert Bazaar I can only rate it based on my experience and for that I have to give a "2" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Although intended as a casual family game Desert Bazaar requires sufficient analysis for good game play that any serious game player will have to thoroughly and carefully consider so many different options each turn that he'll bring the game to a screeching halt. It may work for an entirely casual family group, but for gamers, it doesn't.

In 2 reviews, average style rating is 3.00 and average substance rating is 2.00.