Sports Card Shop Simulator is the latest offering from developer OverPowered Team. On their Steam page, it is described as “Open packs, search for rare cards, and build the best sports card shop”. So let’s take a look at the simulator from publisher “Ultimate Games S.A., PlayWay S.A.”.

Starting off, you are across the road from your shop on a small street football pitch. Interestingly, there is a basic mini-game where you can play a penalty shootout to kill some time. Looking at the store sign, you can change the name of your shop, and it’s time to start the day.

You start with only a small shop, a register, a set of shelves, and a dream. Interestingly, the store doesn’t have a door; to open the shop, you just flip the open/closed sign. Now this is where the game titles became misleading for me, it should actually be called Football Card Simulator, as that’s all you can stock, football cards.

The cards are all based on the national teams of the world, no clubs. You have four different series of football cards, each available in three sizes: individual packs, small boxes, and large collector boxes. To complement the cards, you also have 16 different merchandise items you can unlock, from player kits, collector albums, and card sleeves to balls, to name a few.

There are also 27 different pieces of furniture you unlock as you progress to store your merchandise, and 30 different types of decorations you can add to your store to give it your own flair.

You will be working mainly out of your tablet to run the shop. Opening the tablet, you have a few options:

1. Wholesale: where you buy your products.
2. Store Manager: expansion, painting, etc., in all, you have 30 expansions and 18 storage expansions. There are also 12 different options for painting floors and walls.
3. Bills: there are always bills to pay, wages, and rent.
4. Trading Tables: you can rent out tables for people to trade with others, a good source of passive income.
5. Workers: here you can hire and fire.
6. Auctions: for those more valuable products.
7. Autographs: get those cards signed to increase the value.

There is no shortage of customers, and I find myself continually running out of stock due to the constant flood. At the start, you have to order stock, fill shelves, and serve the customers at the register. As you progress, though, you can hire help to assist with restocking and serving customers. Each worker can be assigned two tasks, sounds ideal, right? Not so much.

I assigned my first helper’s task to serve customers and stock secondary shelves. As he was stocking shelves, customers wanting to pay for their purchases backed up, as, obviously, he couldn’t do two things at once. So after some time, I had to set his secondary task to rest. No problems, my shop is profitable, and I can afford two workers to free up a lot of time to keep the shelves stocked and the orders coming in.

​There is a very nice personal card collection feature in Sports Card Shop Simulator, like other collecting simulators. I find myself sinking a lot of my profits into buying off-the-shelf packets and opening them for my private collections. Like in the real world, there are different levels of cards, gold, silver, autographed, and many more, and it keeps you interested in trying to find the best cards out there.

You even have the ability to grade cards as well. You send them off, and they arrive back the next day with a score and a price, even though you will be $100 poorer for the experience.

You have a personal collector’s album to store all your cards; you can even purchase display cases for your best cards to show off to your customers. You can place a sales stand in your shop that displays the cards from your collection that you actually want to sell.

There is a graph for each card that shows its price over time, so you can ensure you maximise your profits when selling them. A nice little feature is that you can also put yourself or anyone else in the shop by creating your own custom card.

The graphics are your standard simulator management sim graphics. Good variety of customers, and the cards and fixtures are well put together and vibrant in colour. The shop is on a street you can walk down, either end past houses and shops. You can’t interact with anything at this stage, but there is room for expansion if the developers choose to use the space.

There is no day or night cycle; the time just shows 9 pm, and it’s time for the shop to close. You flip the sign over, and the day ends. What I do like is that you can order and start rearranging your shop at 9 pm when people stop coming in, as most simulators don’t let you continue after hours and force you into all these actions during the chaotic workday.

There isn’t much to say about the sounds, extremely basic, no talking from the customers, basic noises when you place furniture down, exciting sound bites when you open up rare cards, and that’s about it. There is your basic calming electronic music as your background music, but as always, I did turn it off.

Overall, Sports Card Shop Simulator is a nice football card shop management simulator. I do find they pigeonhole themselves into the football scene, though. With the extra merchandise you can stock, you will enjoy this title if you are a football fan.

With only three types of cards, though, it can get repetitive once you have filled up your binder. Overall, it’s a solid simulator, just not a lot of content that affects longevity, but it will give you a few hours of enjoyment.

Written by: Mike Bridge