Preview: TCG Card Shop Simulator hit early release, but how does it stack up?

If you’ve been around, you know that simulator games aren’t new for me. I’ve done Clothing Shop Simulator and Real Estate Simulator, so it only seemed natural to get my hands on TCG Card Shop Simulator.

Now, this was a weird one for me because in my lifetime – quite briefly – I ran a real card shop. So, this review is coming from a place of experience.

Is TCG Card Shop Simulator accurate?

As someone with knowledge of the scene, I’ll tell you that TCG Card Shop Simulator is a lot more fun than owning your own shop. 10 out of 10, don’t recommend that business endeavor. However, spoiler, I would recommend playing this simulator if you’ve got an itch that you want to scratch.

As all simulator-type games start, you begin with an empty shop that you have to build up slowly over time. In this game, you do that by buying primarily card packs. But, you also unlock figurines, dice, card sleeves, and a few other nerdy things.

If you’re familiar with buying cards, you know they come in little packs that you can buy individually, or as a box. I loved the attention to detail in allowing the player to stock both for the customer to buy.

In addition to selling the packs and boxes, you can open card packs to build your own collection and then sell off your doubles by buying a card table that will display them. Honestly, I found it all pretty standard.

You have the ability to buy more shelves, stock more products, and you can even pop down a playing table to have your customers sit down and enjoy playing the game.

You basically run your shop through your phone. There, you’ll buy your stock, buy furniture, check the database, and plan events. I was a bit disappointed that the event doesn’t seem to actually do anything visually. But, by running one, it’ll change some percentages in how well things sell.

To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised that there was an app on the phone to check the database. If you’ve ever had any tangible cards, you’ll probably know about the various card databases. Essentially, any card from virtually any established card-collecting game will be in those databases and you can track how much the card goes for. Generally, you can even see a chart of how the numbers fluctuate. 

Shut up and take my money…

I never used the in-game database because I lived it and the NPCs were going to buy it anyway, but it was still a nice touch.

Something that I enjoyed early on, but quickly lost the spark for was selling items. When you ring up a customer, they’ll either pay by cash or card. When the register opened the first time to let me count out the change to give the customer, I was delighted. Every transaction after that, I got more and more irritated.

If you’re like me, you’ll likely start putting things in whole dollar amounts, thus rendering your card database virtually useless. Especially since there is a handy little button when you’re pricing things that say “market value” and will price according to that database.

All in all, it plays like any simulator game. So, if you like those, then you’re going to enjoy TCG Card Shop Simulator. If you don’t… then you won’t. For me, I feel like of the three I’ve mentioned, this one is at the top. But, that just might be coming from a place of knowledge.

As with most of these types of games, the shine does wear off after a bit, but it’s a pretty solid game.

It’s in early access, so we don’t give scores for games that aren’t fully released. All I can is that I recommend TCG Card Shop Simulator if you’re into this genre. They’ve got a lot of things that they’re going to be adding before full release, so I expect the game to get even better.

If you want to give TCG Card Shop Simulator a chance, you can get it over on Steam for $12.99. Otherwise, you can check out the review we did on the Mystopia demo that recently came out.

We were given a review code for TCG Card Shop Simulator by the developer and played it on PC.