My favourite shop sim, TCG Card Shop Simulator, is 40% off on Steam

I love a good shop simulator, even though I’m essentially paying money to do a job that I’m not, in turn, getting paid for. There’s something about watching your shop grow, hiring staff so you spend less time dealing with customers, and so on. Now, my shop sim of choice, TCG Card Shop Simulator, is 40% off in Steam’s Summer Sale, making it just £6.59/$7.99.

TCG Card Shop Simulator sees you managing a shop that sells Pokemon-style trading card games, complete with soft toys, models and so on. You can even hold tournaments in your store and, as a Steam Early Access game, new content is added on a regular basis. But what really makes me grin is the horrible, horrible scalper you can become.

Yes, scalping is terrible, even if people are daft enough to pay for pre-orders of GTA 6. But TCG Card Shop Simulator lets you be a monster, ordering packs en-masse and selling the rare ones. One recent update added a machine to rip open packs for you. There’s not a moustache in the world big enough to twirl.

You can also run your store ethnically, leaving the packs unopened, and just relying on the income from merchandise and so on, if you want to be a goody two-shoes. Some of the activities, such as shelf-filling, aren’t what you’d call fun, but when your shop gets big enough you can employ someone else to do that for you.

You can buy TCG Card Shop Simulator on Steam. The 40% off deal ends July 9th and given that the game’s likely to get pricier when it exits Steam Early Access later this year, that’s another reason to snap it up.