Title: TCG Card Shop Simulator
Developer: OPNeon Games
Publisher: OPNeon Games
Release Date: September 15th, 2024
Platform: Windows: Steam (Early Access)
Reviewed on: Windows: Steam (Early Access)
Price: $12.99 (USD)

When I was in high school, I worked in a board game store for two years. College loomed on the horizon, and I needed to save up some money. That’s not why I took the job, of course. I wanted more money to buy Magic the Gathering cards, which the delicious employee discount, if not the salary, made very possible. And craving that nostalgia of selling hot singles to middle aged men for $12.50 an hour, I bought TCG Card Shop Simulator on early access during a Steam Sale.

Premise

In TCG Card Shop Simulator, you stock cards, sleeves, dice, marketable plushies, and every other commodity a cardboard crack addict might need. Customers then browse your shop, loudly critique your pricing, and slam a pile of those products on the checkout counter, where you manually scan each item and provide exact change for their payment. The frantic balance between stocking items and checking out customers forms the core loop of the game.

Tetramon Cards

Tetramon, the game’s parody of Pokémon, is the central IP within TCG Card Shop Simulator. Selling individual Tetramon is one of the best ways to make money in the game, given the low cost of buying packs in bulk and the ridiculous prices that cards can sell for. The drawback is that this takes time: one must open up a pack, and then individually place each card on a display and set the price. Opening a Tetramon pack and getting a $25, $50, or even $100 card hits that dopamine circuit almost like a real card pack but spares me the financial drain. This is my favorite mechanic in the game. 

Customers also come to trade cards sometimes, and just like at a real game store. These people are often unreasonable, and shocked when you can’t pay them market rate, or higher, on a card. I found the trading mechanic in the game only occasionally worth my while, as it effectively nullifies the high-margin benefit of selling individual cards. 

There is also a very expensive purchase called the workbench, which allows the player to take low value cards and package them in bulk boxes to sell excess cards. These boxes are very slow to sell, and the workbench does not become economical for a long itme.

Employees

As your shop grows and customers swarm your supply like locusts, you might eventually need to hire some help. Through the GO RECRUIT app, you can enlist the help of unenthusiastic wage slaves to run your shop. Hiring them made me understand the attitude of my real boss, wondering why these employees weren’t enthusiastically speedy while stocking shelves or manning the counter.

Frankly, I found employees frustrating. Zack, the first employee you unlock, is okay for restocking shelves, since it’s not a time-sensitive task, and he’s making $3 an hour. His habit of restocking from boxes at random, leaving a dozen half-empty ones across the shop, however, was very annoying. The second employee, who requires three times the salary of the first one, is even worse than that. Terrance is supposed to be fine at checking customers out, but in practice, causes a long line to pile up. On the day I fired Terrance, my revenue doubled, because he was no longer slowing down the checkout process.

I haven’t gotten to unlock higher level employees quite yet, but some of them make six figure salaries for their speed at restocking or cashing out customers. I wish I was making that kind of money at the game store I worked at. Maybe I was too much like Zack or Terrance for my boss to be paying me thousands of dollars per day. Maybe if I was more expedient, a raise from $12.50 an hour to $125 an hour was waiting for me right around the corner.

Smell & Reputation

Another important mechanic is your store’s reputation, which is affected largely by prices, decorations, transaction speed, and smell. Customers, in game and in real life, sometimes come in with a cloud of noxious green fog around them. In real life, there’s not much I could do, so I am grateful for the game’s fantasy of being able to do something about that. In Gameslop, I solved this problem with two airport-security-looking, industrial air fresheners that blast every customer with a sweet, anti-gamer fragrance. Prior to that, the gamer stench was so strong that I had to physically throw my four foot tall air freshener at them. 

The game has a review app that lets you see what customers like or dislike about your shop, and change accordingly. The aforementioned customer smell is the quickest way to tank your shop rating. But if your store doesn’t stink and the prices aren’t too much higher than market, you’re likely to get good reviews.

Controls

The game’s control scheme feels unwieldy and took some time to get used to. It doesn’t feel like there’s any underlying logic to the controls for some actions, especially the opening packs to restocking cards pipeline. Some controls don’t even seem to work as advertised. When giving a customer too much change, right clicking supposedly allows you to remove some coins or bills, but that never seemed to work. I occasionally had to reload the game to escape a transaction that could not be completed.

Graphics & Performance

The game’s graphics aren’t anything exceptional; they’re about par for sim and tycoon games. Customers are bland, blank faced and have little variety or expression on them. The products, however, look great. The Tetramon cards feature adorable parodies of their Pokémon equivalents. As someone with little experience in the Pokémon world, I could not tell the difference.

The performance requirements of the game are rather slim, requiring only 5 GB of storage space and 8 GB of ram. I did not notice any significant performance issues, mostly due to the game not rendering all that much to begin with. 

Development

Currently, TCG Card Shop Simulator is in early access, but has received consistent updates every few months. The most recent one being the decoration update in March, which added a ton of materials, posters, and statues of Tetramon to add around the shop. Planned features include card grading, adding more TCGs, making Tetramon and other games playable, and adding more product types.

Final Score

The premise of TCG Card Shop Simulator is charming, especially for me as a former game store employee. Cracking packs for high value cards, processing large transactions, and unlocking new products are a lot of fun. Even so, the game loop eventually loses steam as the rate of progression slows down. Licenses for new products are expensive and slow to unlock, causing the game to feel grindy at certain points. Prices of items don’t feel very balanced and could use some adjustments. The game’s control scheme, as previously mentioned, feels unpolished, which is not surprising for a game still in early access.

TCG Card Shop Simulator also has a fun attitude toward local game stores and their fandoms. It’s clear that the developers of the game love trading card games and the people who play them. And yet, they don’t shy away from poking fun at the less palatable aspects of these communities, namely hygiene and expectations about the games they play.

I am confident that TCG Card Shop Simulator will continue to be improved over the foreseeable future, and that my rating will grow higher with each future update. Even now, it’s a lot of fun if you’re willing to overlook some of the clunkier gameplay and control elements.

Tell us what you think! Does TCG Card Shop Simulator fulfill your small business fantasies? Share your reactions in the comments below or join the conversation on Boss Rush Network’s Discord, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Featured Image Source: O.P. Neon Games