Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator - Two Minute Review!
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TWO MINUTE GAME REVIEW: Free from Epic Games October 17th to October 24th 2024
Title: Kardboard Kings: Card Shop Simulator
Summary: Open your own Card shop by the seaside! Buy, trade and sell Cards, OR keep them for your own collection! Earn reputation with customers, beat your shop goals, unlock new decorations, and host exciting events to bring everyone to the best Card shop in town! You are Harry Hsu, a young man who recently inherited a card shop from his father, a former champion of the famous card game "Warlock." With the shop's reputation on the line, you start working behind the counter, juggling the locals' requests while trying to familiarize yourself with owning a shop. Your guide, Giuseppe, a fast-talking Cockatoo, helps you in your buying and selling journey - securing cards of various rarities to top collectors or helping an enthusiastic customer from the neighbourhood.
Release Date: Feb 10, 2022
Rating: Rating []
Developer: Henry's House
Publisher: Akupara Games
Platforms: PC, Switch
Genres: Tycoon, collect-a-thon, card game
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Kardboard Kings is a cozy management game where you run a card shop. The price you buy and sell cards at is dictated by market value, so The core gameplay revolves around ordering cards online based on predicted trends dictated by the news, and selling them for profit, as well as maintaining a good reputation.
Other than a few limited and repetitive events and more cards being added to the pool, the gameplay loop never evolves from this. You only ever get to sell six individual cards at a time, with no expansion opportunities for the shop and decorations being purely cosmetic. The buying mechanic too is fairly simple, with only a few options each day. You can also quickly learn which cards are under-priced and build a large stash of cheap cards to easily take advantage of long term trends without needing to attention to the news. The reputation too system is straightforward: you can max it out by simply being overly generous, resulting in a much busier shop long term. The Game+ mode adds taxes and harsher price fluctuations, but it doesn’t address the deeper balancing issues.
The recent Card Island update allows players to actually play the card game. The winner is decided through a mix of rock-paper-scissors mechanics and card power, with additional boosts from support cards of the same color, and diverse colours in play allowing you to draw extra cards. It's serviceable, but relies a lot on luck, and you don't get to build your own deck. The tournament also doesn't add to the story, and the prize for winning is not worth it.
Overall, Kardboard Kings is more of a cozy collector game than a solid management sim or card game. Story-wise, it ends suddenly and disappointingly after about 3 hours. You can continue to play, but there are no motivators other than collecting all the cards, and don't expect anything to change in the simple repetitive routine.