Bargain Quest Review

There are very few games I would say a perfect, or close enough to it to where it doesn't matter anymore. I suppose I should say that there are games that I find to be perfect for me, but I can't bring myself to say so. There are games that just hit an ideal so purely and effectively that I can't help but love them with all I've got. 

Oh, is Bargain Quest one of those or what. 

The idea behind Bargain Quest is ingenious:  you are a shop-keeper in a typical Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world. Your town is in peril. The heroes have come. But they need things to go into the dungeon and fight: weapons, armor, knicknacks, that sorta thing. So they come to you. The shopkeeper. And it's up to you. 

But that bottle of snake oil? It can look like a magical ointment and cost a lot more. Maybe, just maybe, you can pawn it off and make a buck. It's just one thing, right? Right? And maybe your hero dies. He can't come back and complain, can he??

Actually that's a bit dark when you put it like that.

At any rate, this is a drafting game: draw four cards. Pick one, pass to the left, keep going until the cards are all out. One of those cards is your display item, which is used to attract customers. It can't be used to actually sell to someone, so you have to be careful what you put in the shop. You then sell as much stuff to your hero as he has money. And you send him out.

And here's where it gets tricky.

Because new heroes will invariably have more money than returning customers. So maybe you want to make them to survive! But there's this freaking deck in the game that you draw, which gives random modifiers to your heroes. Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're bad. But they come with these awesome adjectives ("Heroic", "Nervous", "Gloomy") that give you just this tiniest bit of an idea of what's going on in the hero's skull. They also make it impossible to predict exactly how things will go down. I mean, you can prep if you know the range. Within reason.

You then get Victory Points for damaging and surviving the creature, as the fame of your shop spreads. And these are not small-fry rewards either: each Victory Point is equal to 10 bucks! Okay, it's not actually dollars, but I'm not sure what the money denomination actually is. It sure isn't gold. Point is, if your adventurer does well you may be able to keep up with your compatriots who decided to throw their dudes under the bus. But that's only a maybe, and that gray area is where the fun of the game is.

Regardless, you get to upgrade your shop and add employees, after seeing what happens to the heroes. You can add more items to the display, add more storage space so you don't have to junk as many cards between rounds. And then you keep doing that until all the monsters are defeated! Hooray! It's a very simple idea. And it's this simplicity that Jonathan Ying owns, all the way through.