Bargain Quest Review – No Refunds in this Fantasy Walmart

While roleplaying games are known for living out your fantasies as a heroic adventurer. Fighting off dragons to save the damsel! Or slaying brigands to restore the town to its former glory! In Bargain Quest you’re not doing any of that.

Instead, you’re the NPC.

Like the blacksmith who crafts the magical swords, the woman who’s lost her husband in the mines, or the store clerk serving adventurers. Yes, in Bargain Quest you’ll be running a fantasy Walmart, drafting and selling all the magical items you can get your hands on.

Except it’s not all about earning that Scrooge McDuck money. As while money is good, renown is better; even if it’s second-hand. You don’t want to save the village, but you want to be the shopkeeper who sells the sword that saves the village.

There’s no better advertisement than that.

So, you need to be selective in the equipment you stock, and who you sell it to.

Thankfully, Bargain Quest allows you to be a discerning shopkeeper. You start each round by placing items in your shop window, trying to attract powerful adventurers.

Once they’re in your shop, you need to sell them more equipment than they need. Because let’s face it, you might never see them again. And what good is their money doing on the floor of a dungeon? Wouldn’t it be better in your cash register?

After weighing down the adventurer with your stock, they saunter off to fight the local boss monster. Where they either win, and you get that sweet second-hand renown, or they lose, and well…

No refunds.

The best theme in board gaming!

The theme and artwork are equally brilliant and work well together. The way it incorporates the common role-playing game tropes, but from the perspective of the shopkeeper is amazing. Although it doesn’t stray far, you still get to see the hero fight the bad guy at the end of the day.

However, it plays around a lot with the idea. Such as the extremely weak but rich nobleman who’s bound for death in the next battle, to the underaged wizard going out on their first adventure.

This sense of humour flows throughout the rest of the cards in the game. One of my favourites is the cute Shop Dog who sits in your shop’s window luring in all adventurers.

Because who can resist a cute dog?

You’ll get a lot of enjoyment from the odd scenarios you come across throughout your plays. Things play out like a game of Dungeons and Dragons where the Player’s Handbook has been thrown out the window.

Beyond the theme

In terms of gameplay, Bargain Quest is a card drafting game. You’ll draw four cards at the start of each round. Picking one and passing on the rest until you’ve got a new hand of cards to play with that round. Once you’ve drafted your hand of items, there are five more steps in the round to be carried out.

It doesn’t have a sharp focus on what it’s trying to do, or how you do it. So instead of a streamlined experience, you wander through these loosely connected steps like you would an unfamiliar grocery store looking for bread. Before the hero you selected takes on the bad guy and either scores you points or dies.

Bargain Quest feels a lot like Dinosaur Island, where it doesn’t understand what makes the game fun, and just throws mechanics at the wall hoping something sticks.

Compounding this feeling is there are not enough decisions to be made throughout these long turns. Most of the decision-making is front-loaded into the card drafting at the start of the round. Then the rest of the round feels like busy work, as the cards play themselves.

The shopkeeper’s dilemma

Bargain Quest is in dire need of a journey of self-discovery. You can see this in both the game mechanics, but also the core idea of the game. That is adventurers are a dime a dozen, it’s the shopkeeper who’s the hero of the story.

Therefore, you’d expect to enter this cycle of going through several adventurers as they take on monsters well outside their experience level.

But this cycle never happened for us.

Instead, the heroes we were dealt rarely fell to the monsters. Meaning instead of having a cavalcade of interesting heroes visiting our shops, causing us to make interesting decisions we instead had the regulars.

You know the type, the adventurers who came around so frequently you’ve learned their first names, hygiene habits and marital struggles.

It all became a bit stagnant.

Making this stagnation worse is the ability to hold onto cards between rounds. Often, you’re holding on to your shop window cards. Meaning, for better or worse, you’ll get the same hero repeatedly.

With Bargain Quest’s unique theme and gorgeous production, I found myself rooting for it. Hoping it would be something special. But the disconnect between what the game wants to be, and what it is, makes what could’ve been a great game only good.