TCG Card Shop Simulator: Everything About the Free Prologue

TCG Card Shop Simulator's Prologue, a free game, has just been released on Steam! The early access for the actual game is scheduled to be released on September 25th.

We at Cards Realm decided to test it out and bring you our review. In this article, we'll show you exactly what it gives its players in terms of content.

To give you some context: in this game, we've just left a stable job to found our own card game shop, centered around the fictional game "Tetramon Duel Master". So, first we need to name it:

Soon, we have some tasks to complete that introduce us to some game features. The first one, for instance, is buying products in the market. Please note that your initial budget is a thousand dollars.

You'll spend your first few minutes understanding how buying and selling products works. After you place an order in the market, the products you ordered will be delivered to the curb just outside your business. Get them and go fill the shop's shelves with it.

Then, you'll see a red exclamation point that indicates your products don't have

a "price" yet. Just click on the price tag with your mouse's left button to set a price.

You'll see some information about the product itself, like how much it cost you, and how much it costs, on average, in the overall market.

After you do this, you'll get your first buyers. They can transfer you the money with a card, or just give you bills. If they give you bills, pay attention when you're giving them their change, as you can, accidentally, give them a bit more than you should.

Please note, as well, how they behave when they look at your products, as they'll constantly give you some feedback while they browse your store. They'll often say something like: "God, this is so expensive!", or "This is a really fair price!". Use these comments as a base to adjust the price of your products.

By the way, since I'm showing you the image above, I'll take this opportunity to point out one of the negatives of this game, which is the fact that it doesn't have many diverse character models. So, you'll often see two identical customers, like in the image above.

These customers will also tell you when they expect more variety in your shop. In the image below, the person told me they didn't find the D20 they wanted and left without buying anything.

As the game progresses, you'll get new tasks, which will add even more variety and new details to your shop. You can, for instance, get a few boosters from your stock, and open them to get singles, which you can keep in an album. Each booster gives you 7 cards.

You can collect them or sell them all, but, for that, you'll need a new piece of furniture called a "Card Shelf".

As you can see, each card is different, and thus they all have different prices, as their power and rarity matter for this type of business. If you're lucky, you can find some shiny variations that are more expensive.

Another great addition for your shop are game tables, where your customers can meet and battle for hours. The longer they're there, the more money you'll get in the end, so it's as if they're "renting" the tables.

You can also pick which format they play on those tables, like Standard or Pauper. Each one is different; for instance, if you pick Pauper, you'll add more value to your common boosters and cards, as the other rarities won't be as interesting to your customers then.

You can also update the price of the table whenever you want.

At the end of the day, you'll get a fascinating report with all your relevant numbers: sales, clients, number of matches played on the tables, and much more.

What most stood out to me about this game is how it always brings you new features, like, for instance, expanding your shop, or hiring a new worker. However, all these new features are locked behind a specific Shop Level.

You'll also need to pay your bills, and meet preestablished deadlines.

When you progress a bit more, you can access other items. In the prologue itself, I'll highlight these products: Boosters, Boxes, Deck Boxes, D20, cleansers, and figurines. The game itself will include many other items when it is finally released, according to the information on its Steam page.

However, not everything is sales. Cleansers are also perfect to deal with some clients who just don't smell that great, as they can drive away people from your business. Just get a cleanser and spray them with some product.

The game itself has some visual bugs, but we must consider that this is an indie game still in development. Nonetheless, we had to note down these bugs for our review.

The characters don't have hitboxes, so they just go through each other.

As we mentioned before, we also met many identical characters, which is annoying sometimes.

Finally, I don't know if this is intentional or just a bug, but sometimes I saw a customer standing up waiting for a game to end to sit down and wait for an opponent, all while there is another player waiting, alone, at the next side table (which doesn't make a lot of sense).

We must remember this is a simple game that depicts the daily lives of niche TCG shop owners, and, in this sense, TCG Card Shop Simulator is perfect. You really do feel like a TCG shop owner, even if sometimes the bugs break this immersion. I believe TCG fans will feel represented by this game.

In this game, you can create different events and matches for your clients, as well as open your own boosters to collect these cards or sell them separately, which are just a few things that we're all familiar with as TCG fans.

I truly did let go of any concerns about visual bugs or ugly graphics because that's not what this game is about. TCG Card Shop Simulator really surprised me, and I'm excited to see its release!

What about you? What did you think of this game? Will you play it? Tell us all your thoughts in our comment section below!

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!