A week ago today (the day you’re reading this and six days after I’m writing this), I stopped resisting my desire to buy any kind of new game to help me get over Dragon Age: The Veilguard and bought a game I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I’d thought to buy it last month, but I was busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition and couldn’t afford any distractions. I was already distracted enough, thanks to being neck-deep in Dragon Age stuff and Veilguard just around the corner, so I let it pass and figured that, by the time I thought of it again, I’d probably be over my incredibly surface-level interest. I mean, I’m not one for simulator games and TCG Card Shop Simulator is just another entry in a long line of incredibly similar-looking games, so why would this one hold my interest in a way that literally none of the others ever have? Other than, you know, being introduced to it by watching two members of Friends at the Table have a great time playing it and it being focused around not only something I have personal experience with (trading card games, which is what TCG stands for) but something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about (game shops). So, last Tuesday, while in a fit of malaise and depression, I bought the game and immediately lost three hours of my life.

You see, I’m a big fan of task-based games, even if those tasks aren’t necessarily prescribed by the game itself (though that certainly helps). I like having projects. I like being able to see my progress by watching numbers go up, by watching things come together, or watching structures rise from concept to reality. It lets me feel a sense of control I never get to have in my real life and create a degree of order that, because its a video game, won’t be quickly undone by the slow turning of the world we all live in. Normally, I get my fix for this niche need through games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Valheim, or similar survival/building games. Even Animal Crossing can give me this in small doses and only isn’t one of my staples because there’s an upper-limit on how much you can do in a day since the game works on real-world time. I once thought that simulator type games would be a new avenue to explore for my much-desired feelings of control and task-oriented play, but the few I tried never really lived up to what I wanted due to either their lack of polish or swiftly diminishing returns. Which is why I resisted the idea of buying TCG Card Shop Simulator initially and even tried to convince myself not to try it out. I’ve gone down this path before and only haven’t written about them because there’s no reason to. They weren’t bad, just not giving me what I wanted.

TCG Card Shop Simulator, though, is giving me exactly what I wanted. Reasonable numbers, a constant flurry of little tasks, interesting visuals, mathematical strategy based on vibes and the whims of the “market,” and an endless stream of weirdos walking through my front door to “play” cards with each other or say something skeptical about my merchandise while buying stuff like they’re someone out of a math problem. For instance, my favorite dude, Green Shirt Guy, likes to come into my shop, look at every shelf, complain about how everything is too expensive, and then buy thirty packs of cards. Clearly they’re not too expensive if he’s buying that many! Another fun part of the game is the reviews you can check about your shop. It’s mostly meaningless text in each review, but they can also be a good indication if your prices are just a little too high or just high enough to be making money hand over fist but not so high that people will actually decide not to buy anything. I do wish I didn’t get numbers about how many people left the shop without buying something, but that just seems to be how these kinds of games work. They also usually have some kind of mechanic built around your shop’s rating or reputation, but this one doesn’t seem to do anything with your reputation. At least not that I’ve seen. The rating could be a part of figuring out how many customers show up in a day, but I haven’t seen anything yet and I’m not tanking my shop’s rating just to find out.

The weirdest part of the game, though, is how some of the items seem to be time-gated. I mean, most of them are level or money-gated, only allowing you to buy them after your level is high enough and you can afford the license fee, but I’ve been doing really well on the money front and yet, when I get some items, people don’t seem to be buying them until a day or two later after I’ve unlocked them. If I was slightly less successful at manipulating game mechanics like this whole cost versus purchase quantity thing, I’d probably be only able to buy those products on the days that people start buying them which feels like too much of a coincidence to be entirely random. I know from the stream I watched that people will eventually start asking for and complaining about the lack of specific items as time passes, so I’m guessing there’s some kind of code in the background that prevents customers from wanting things before a certain day and maybe some other code to push customers to buy random things so these limits are somewhat hidden. This is entirely me speculating, though, so who knows? I might make some new files and only buy high tier/cost items just to see if this is true, but I might not. I want to relax and watch numbers go up, not test a video game I’m not affiliated with. That’s my day job. Testing stuff, not testing video games specifically. I don’t want to ACTUALLY be working while I’m video game working. C’mon. Who’d want that?

Anyway, it’s a decent time and worth the ten-ish bucks I paid for it. I dunno how long my interest will last (I might even be bored with it by the time you’re reading this), but I’ll take what I can get right now since this is the first game I want to actually play again after trying to engage with it post-Veilguard. Which is high praise, sure, but also not really a comparison I can make since I’ve only played it as a post-Veilguard video game player. I have no pre-Veilguard memories of it, so my brain can’t compare the two when I’m not looking and leave me feeling bored and uninterested like it has with everything else I’ve tried. In that instance, at least, this is the best game I’ve ever played when it comes to not being compared to Veilguard. No other game has been as not compared to Veilguard as this one. Everything else about it is perfectly fine and adequately distracting and what more could I want right now than that?