Table Battle Simulator Preview

Table Battle Simulator is a simulator game where your goal is to run your own tabletop figurine shop. Considering the cute anime aesthetic and the fun promotional art, and my own goal of, once again, living vicariously through videogames, I thought it would be worth a look-see.

Published and developed by Kiki Games, Table Battle Simulator will soon be available in Early Access. It’s a relatively simple game: you order your own surprise boxes to then sell to the various customers who come into the shop. You need to put them on the shelves, and there are also perks available to buy that can help when you battle your customers. Does this mean that you’ll have memorable encounters? …No.

Many of the NPCs look incredibly similar, and it doesn’t help that they also don’t have any personality or expression. Are you marking your prices too high on the shelf? They won’t get angry, they’ll just walk out. Will they get angry at waiting in line for you to pay? No. Arguably, once you open the shop and before you hire your own cashier, you’re in charge of running the till. Click the right change to give out, and you’re good to go. Despite the Japanese setting outside, full of cherry blossom trees and the like, you’re obviously in America with the usage of dollars and cents.

Once you hire a cashier… this is where it gets mind-numbing. Your job then changes to ensuring that the shelves are stocked, so keep an eye on your supply. I should also note that it’s easy to end up putting them on a completely different shelf, so you need to be careful or else your aesthetic (there isn’t one in the beginning) will suffer. But you can also battle your customers with your game table once you purchase one, and build up your own battle deck.

In battle, your job is to defeat your enemy’s hero, and to do that, you’ll need to win a round to do damage. But, to level up to get more characters, you’ll need to spend the coins you earn each round. As you start a round, you’ll get two coins, and you can spend these to summon a character to fight for you. They’ll then respawn after each round, but there’s a chance to add more of them with each turn, so long as you have the right level.

There’s a maximum of seven heroes per side of the board, and the maximum level the player can reach is seven. Each character has different health and abilities, but they’ll also be randomly generated, and to refresh, you’ll need to spend one of your valuable coins, or you can sell one.

The battles themselves feel like they take forever. There’s a 30-second wait time for each turn as you prepare each monster. You place them on the board, and boom, watch them fight. I feel like it would be more fun if there were more of a goal to accomplish. You can get an achievement for completing each collection, but the boxes only contain three random heroes. They won’t cost you anything, except that it does feel like you’re stealing your own stock.

As you serve the customers, you’ll notice the NPCs go on a predetermined path, and they tend to clip through one another if there’s more than one at either the till or the shelves. You can unlock a warehouse and other parts of the store, but it’ll take a while. If you make your prices too expensive? Customers will walk out, as I mentioned before, and if they’re too cheap, then you’re not making a profit. Or if the game table is being used, then some customers will also just leave.

If you want each day to be exactly the same, then this is what you can expect from Table Battle Simulator. All you’re working towards is unlocking more boxes to sell, and to unlock your second set, you’ll need to get to level 5 and also spend $1500 to get the license to sell them, and then you’ll still need to buy the stock. Never mind the fact that you’ll need to keep buying the stock you’re already selling, and you’ll also need to save up for more furniture, otherwise you just have a blank space. Furniture isn’t cheap either: it’s $500 for a combat table, and $100 for extra shelves and $250 for your first massive statue — of which having one won’t change any stats in the shop, it’s there just so you have some kind of furniture.

Plus, it did the greatest insult to anyone in retail: what kind of jerk customers will keep coming in after the store is closed at nine o’clock in the evening? This felt like a pain, as the clock stopped, but customers kept coming in. Sure, they eventually left, but if the day stops at nine, then I expect a flurry before then, not when I have the option to begin a new day.

While this may be a little harsh for an Early Access title, I do hope that they implement more into it. Maybe give the NPCs more life? Give more reasons to partake in battles, aside from an arbitrary ranking system that isn’t explained. By all accounts, I have no reason to partake in battles aside from the need to escape being on the till, but with my NPC employee, I don’t even have that.

I just have management responsibilities. It’s not even like Warhammer, where you paint your own miniatures. It’s essentially a case of collecting them and maybe selling them when you have enough of them to level them up. I just think that there are a lot of improvements still to be made to make Table Battle Simulator more enjoyable for me. Plus, at this point in time… it doesn’t stand out much in the rife competition of other simulators out there. It’s more of a guessing game as to what price will work for the day, and once I reached level seven? Well, it actually seemed harder to get sales for some reason, and they no longer cared for the boxes I had in stock.

Ultimately, I think there are still a lot of improvements that need to be made to make Table Battle Simulator an enjoyable experience. I found it too slow for my liking, and there was also no background music aside from the beeps from your till. Prices are expensive, but they also fluctuate, with the 40-pack box sometimes costing $420 and other times, $405. I wished there was more of a way to gauge what the customers wanted, and more context on the ranking system for players. It just seems like there’s a lot of grinding currently, and that doesn’t seem worth it considering the battles are more attrition-based, and whoever has the higher HP will inevitably win.

But hey, maybe it’s just not the game for me? If you want to try it out, then Table Battle Simulator will be available on Steam’s Early Access on 16th February.