Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator

C'est rare, mais j'ai trouvé ce jeu horripilant sur tous les points : DA, écriture, character design, musique, sons, déroulement, même le tuto est désagréable. L'idée est plutôt cool, mais les cartes elles-mêmes sont affreuses, j'aurais honte de tenir boutique pour vendre de telles horreurs. [i]Karboard kings[/i] a aussi un effet irrépressible, une pulsion de Alt F4.

This is a unique game that could have been really cool, sadly there are many things that make it less enjoyable: - story: the story is weird, which is not necessarily bad, but there is just not enough of it? you can chat with some NPCs but after a few chats it just repeats and you never really get a lot out of it. the "main" (?) story about legendary cards is also really lacking? i've played for 5 hours and only gotten like 2 or 3 cutscenes - the main character: is very unlikable. there are many voicelines where he is just an a** and you have no options to make him nicer. This is not a huge deal but it really bugged me - reputation: this is a system that is not explained enough imo and can eally screw you over. I have no idea what i did in the beginning but i managed to completely tank my reputation and working to better is took ages. especially that customer interactions (asking what a card's name is or which deck is better) feel unfair -especially in the beginning- because you just don't have the knowledge yet to answer them correctly. - "which deck is better" is also one of the things that are increadibly annoying: there are different things that make a deck better but you basically have to learn by trial and error. The balancing is also not 100% clear, you have an "ability", the power and the decks' card colors to take in mind and I still have no idea which of them is more important. - card island: managing the shop is fine, gambing about card values is fun but the card game itself made me want to pull my hair out. you have to look for the rules instead of being given a tutorial of some kind and even after playing some duels, i have absolutely no idea how to put a stragedy together. The duels also take way too much time, you have to repeat your first game until you win and if you fail one game you are out and have to spend more money to try again (50-200 bucks). - shop goals: a nice idea but very frustrating. it feels like get get harder to complete much too quickly, i failed the first few, then had a moment where i tought i finally had it figured out, only for them to increase difficulty in an extreme way ("get 300 bucks in 7 days" vs "get 600 bucks in 7 days"). I'm kinda angry i cannot recommend Kardboard kings because there are moments where i really enjoy it, sadly at the point i am at now, there are more and more things i dread than look forward to.

Did I spend too many hours on this? Yes. Did I enjoy it? A bit. But the game has so many issues it's kind of startling. The story jumps all over and ends so abruptly it caught me off guard. The art and stylization of the cards is nice. The idea of 4 cards pack (which are only available some days, at random) of 10 card sets is... interesting. The 'game', when you play it, feels clumsy and frustrating. The game has a lot of QOL frustration - getting the last few achievements (especially all shiny cards) is a nightmare that takes way too long resetting. I wanted to like it, and I think it had some interesting ideas, but it feels undercooked... needs more time in the oven.

[b]You like card games but bad reviews for this game makes you doubt it?[/b] Im here to help. Being straightforward I would recommend this game if you really like card games and collecting them. I played Magic The Gathering and this game really feels fun from that perspective. If you hate repetitive playing or just waiting then this might be not your best choice. Now a little about the game [h1]Story[/h1] Game starts with somewhat actually engaging story, but going on it just ends with main character saying he wants to just have a card shop. So if a story is crucial for you, you might be disappointed. [h1]Gameplay[/h1] Now the fun part. In the card shop you need to buy cards, sell them and look at news that will affect the price of cards. And that's pretty much it. Every 2 weeks there will be a new set released which adds more cards. For achievement you can try to get all holographic cards for your collection, which can be frustrating but at least some kind of a goal. Also there are legendary cards but I only realized that to get them you need to complete secret tasks, which without knowing would be really hard to do. You can also fight with cards but with a restriction. After completing the main story you unlock card game island. Every Monday you can get a ticket and participate in the game. Unfortunately you don't get to pick your own deck, which is weird but ok. In there you will see actually a fun game that requires you to think and do the right actions to beat your opponents. But playing it for a while you get ahead of it and it becomes not so fun anymore. Nonetheless at least you get to play with cards. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] All my hours I spent on achieving all achievements and getting all holographic cards was the hardest for me. I can say this game will easily help you pass time if you need that. But after a while it truly becomes boring. I'd recommend to at least get it on sale.

I truly wish that there was more to this game. I'm not saying it's shallow or uninteresting, it has a lot of passion and I straight up haven't bought another "TCG shop" simulator if the card art doesn't even amount up to half of what KK provided me with, which is to say that I haven't bought any at all since because it's that good. There is a story. It's a fun story. And it's fun to take a break from the eventual mindless loop of buying/selling cards. But it just stops man. It stops in the weirdest of places, and I thought there would be more. The ending(?) just sort of happens and life goes on, you're still hunting down legendary cards and nothing really comes of it. Big Bad CEO plot coming to a full halt was saddening. Also the TCG itself, "Warlock", I feel like doesn't even know how its own metas would've functioned. When you're asked to judge which deck would function better, one of the deciding factors is how many colors are in the deck, being the more the better. However, in the actual TCG in Card Island, not working towards some semblance of a mono deck means you're drawing a rainbow of cards that can't actually support one another. So I suppose everybody playing Warlock decided that having "Heart of the Cards" be the foundation of their decks was optimal. I think there was probably more to this card game than "my number and type bigger and better than your card so I win", based off of that world building note alone. But hey, it's all pointless ranting for a presumed dead game I tragically love, and if it goes on sale, you might as well get it. Worst case scenario is you have 5 hours of pretty fun gameplay, and then a game to maybe one day come back to if you want to put something up on your second monitor to play while you do other stuff.

I got this for free and it's not good enough to be worth that price. The game is glacially slow. There's no way to speed up time, and you don't get to set prices or manage your inventory in any meaningful way. Instead you just buy things when they're cheap, then wait painfully for the prices to spike enormously. The game punishes you by forcing you to accept bad deals or lose reputation. The card game isn't very fun to play either. Despite those complaints, Kardboard Kings is also incredibly easy. You simply buy the cheapest cards and wait without going out of business and you eventually make money. There's no real strategy needed, just don't overspend and you'll be rolling in money. The 'story' is barebones and made worse by the characters themselves, who are unpleasant to look at and speak like an AI was fed tumblr posts. The fact that this game costs twenty bucks feels insulting. It's also incredibly short and part of it is in the form of someone's high school comic they offer to let you read on the main menu.(it's not worth it either)

Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator is a handheld (Nintendo Switch)/console game that's also been put on Steam as a bit of an afterthought, as it's very much designed for the handheld/console gaming audience. There's a lot of potential for this game that's been wasted on an incredibly weak, almost mobile app tier technical delivery. There's certainly a market for business tycoon games, and amongst those, yes, a trading card game shop simulator. And that's what you do in this game, buy and sell trading cards... but it's surprisingly shallow for what it is, the gameplay becomes stale quickly, and the godawfully bad Nintendo Switch limitations make the whole package unpleasant to handle. It's nice that there's an almost fleshed out cardgame and tournament system contained in the tycoon game, but for any of this to be successful it would need to be deeper, and the graphics would need to look better than what 12 year olds can do with MS-Paint. There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. The developers failed one of the most basic, fundamental requirements of game design.. "Show, don't tell." So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not read through hours of garbage intersituals. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. Because this is designed for handheld/portable gaming appliances, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the low power handheld gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the mobile game developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for low power handhelds forces upon a game. While this might run well on a Steam Deck, we must remember the vast majority of gamers here are gaming on PC. The graphics aren't great, low quality illustrated backgrounds with inexplicably awful billboarded pixelcrap characters. That will understandably a turn off for a lot of gamers, and it's a big contributor to the failure of the game to attract gamers despite having no up-front cost. Gaming is a primarily visual medium, and if developers want to succeed, they must understand that it's not an area for compromise. You deserve better than compromises. To make matters worse, while lazy, low quality pixel "art" has been used, making the game look bad, many elements of the game aren't done with pixelcrap... which accomplishes a couple of things. First, it shows the developers perhaps could have done better and they knew it, so that's a major screwup. Secondly, it destroys any hopes the developer had of creating a "retro aesthetic" as their excuse for the lazy pixelart compromise... It looks completely inauthentic from a retro gaming perspective. Visually, this is a hamfisted mess, a dogs breakfast of bad visuals, and this kind of laziness and poor quality should never be foisted on gamers. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. These technical shortcomings push this game below minimum standards for any competently developed modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "", , trivial to achieve, but less than 0 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 140,000+ games on Steam? Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator has the farcical price of $20 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. There's enough defects and quality problems with this game that it's really impossible to recommend to gamers. For comparison, the $20 asking price for this game could get you games like "Red Dead Redemption 2", "Factorio" or "The Outer Wilds". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. No pixelcrap is worth $20. If amateur developers want to be paid the same kind of money as real game developers, they need to learn how to do graphics properly.

Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator, developed by Henry's House, Oscar Brittain, and Rob Gross and published by Akupara Games, takes a surprisingly heartfelt approach to a niche hobby that many players immediately recognize. Rather than presenting itself as a traditional management simulator filled with spreadsheets and endless optimization, the game embraces the culture surrounding collectible card games and builds an experience around community, nostalgia, and the joy of discovering something rare. Players step into the shoes of Harry Hsu, who inherits a struggling card shop from his father and sets out to rebuild both the business and its place within the town of Parakeet Bay. The central gameplay loop is built around buying booster packs, stocking shelves, setting prices, and interacting with customers searching for their next prized addition. The fictional card game, Warlock, serves as the backbone of the entire experience, featuring a large assortment of cards with different rarities, conditions, and values that fluctuate over time. Opening packs remains one of the game's strongest hooks, successfully recreating the anticipation associated with real-world collectibles. Every rare pull feels rewarding, and the decision to either sell a valuable card for immediate profit or keep it for a growing personal collection adds a satisfying layer of strategy. Managing the store is straightforward but engaging. Players gradually unlock upgrades that expand the shop's capabilities, decorate the space to improve its appeal, and host events to increase their reputation within the community. Customers often arrive with unique requests or offers, encouraging players to pay attention to market trends and maintain a balanced inventory. The business systems are intentionally accessible, making Kardboard Kings easy to pick up even for those unfamiliar with simulation games. While veterans of the genre may wish for more complex financial mechanics, the streamlined approach allows the game to maintain its relaxing pace without becoming overwhelming. What elevates Kardboard Kings beyond many comparable simulators is its focus on storytelling. Parakeet Bay is populated by an assortment of quirky and memorable characters, each contributing to the game's warm atmosphere. Conversations unfold naturally, revealing personal stories, town secrets, and an overarching mystery tied to the origins of the Warlock card game. The inclusion of Giuseppe, Harry's talkative bird companion, adds a touch of humor throughout the journey. The narrative isn't particularly groundbreaking, but it provides enough emotional investment to make players care about the people who visit the shop every day. Artistically, the game embraces a colorful and inviting presentation. Character portraits are expressive, card illustrations are imaginative, and the coastal setting reinforces the cozy nature of the experience. Combined with a pleasant soundtrack, Kardboard Kings delivers an atmosphere that feels welcoming from beginning to end. It is the type of game that encourages players to slow down, spend time organizing their shelves, and appreciate the simple satisfaction of watching a small business flourish. The visual design may not push technical boundaries, but it complements the game's tone exceptionally well. However, the experience is not entirely without flaws. Once the narrative reaches its conclusion, players may find that the management systems have little left to offer beyond completing collections and maximizing profits. Repetition eventually sets in, particularly during longer sessions, and some mechanics lack the depth needed to sustain extensive replayability. Those expecting a highly detailed simulation on the level of dedicated tycoon games may come away wanting more complexity. A handful of technical hiccups and interface inconveniences also occasionally interrupt the otherwise smooth experience. Despite these limitations, Kardboard Kings succeeds because it understands its audience. It captures the excitement of collecting, the comfort of running a neighborhood hobby store, and the bonds formed through shared interests. Its blend of shop management, collectible hunting, and character-driven storytelling creates a charming package that feels distinct within the simulation genre. For fans of trading card games or cozy management titles, it offers a relaxing and memorable adventure that is easy to recommend. Rating: 7/10

没什么意思，太容易腻了。

長々書いていたのですが消えたので短くまとめます。 全実績解除したのでレビュー。 感想　 キャラに魅力をあまり感じない、 毎日パックが引けないのが残念、 早い段階で作業になる、 カードゲームのルールを作るのは難しいとは思うがゲームも運と作業の要素を強く感じた。 実績関連 お金稼ぎ　簡単 レジェンドカード集め　分かりづらい （まぁレジェンドだからねそういうものかも） 所持金0.所持カード0 一つのアカウントでやろうとすると大変 キラカード図鑑埋め　苦行 カードゲーム島　運次第　私は苦行 昨今カードショップシミュレーションゲームが増えてきているので、このゲームをあえて買う理由は一人称視点だと酔う場合ぐらい？ 定価の2300円でオススメできるかと言えば残念ながら×です。 私は安値で買ったので値段相応楽しめました。 革新的なアップデートを期待します南無。