My name is Clare, I am the owner of Peebles Comics & Games (along with my husband Simon). We are a small comic book and games store in the Scottish Borders and I run the shop with my colleague Alex.
When we started, I actually knew little about TCGs until I opened the store other than playing a little MTG and watching my kids and husband play Pokémon. However I have really gotten into Lorcana since it launched, I love the game mechanics and the art on the cards is beautiful.
How did you get started in opening the shop?
We have run various online comic subscription services for the last 20 years. We moved up from London to Scotland 9 years ago and bought an ongoing online comic business based in Glasgow. We have unfortunately since had to close this down. However, 5 years ago we opened a brick and mortar comic shop in Peebles and have grown the business from there.
We’ve always loved comics and board games and there was not a comic book store in the whole of the Scottish Borders despite there being pockets of TCG, RPG and board game players who had nowhere to buy products or meet other like minded people.
What is the TCG scene like in the area? What products do you stock the most?
We stock Lorcana, Pokémon (when we can!), MTG, One Piece and Yu-Gi-Oh and try and promote them all but Pokémon is our biggest by far. We are a tiny store so we do not have space for organised play in the shop unfortunately.
We have a huge amount of support for Pokémon as well as a few very active MTG players and a small Lorcana following. While we don’t have the space in the shop for people to play, we do sometimes play Magic or Lorcana at our regular board games group.
What makes your shop unique?
We are small but mighty. We cram a lot of products into a small space so we normally have something for everyone. Our unique selling point though is our service, we go above and beyond for all of our customers and provide as personal a service as we can.
Although we offer pre-orders for all our TCGs, we purposefully do not sell Pokémon online to avoid scalpers getting their hands on it. We only sell to local and regular customers with the aim of getting products directly to players and collectors.
We also ensure we have a strong presence on social media. We’re always sharing what new products we have from comics to trading cards! We also have groups where fans of particular brands can connect with each other, for instance, Pokemon fans discussing the latest release.
What would be your advice for getting into the TCG hobby? Equally, can you share one of your favourite moments from running the shop?
Learn to play! It’s not just about completing the sets or collecting. You’ll appreciate the cards and the artwork so much more if you create a deck and play with your favourite cards.
As for favourite moments, it’s always lovely to see our customers supporting each other. One of our Pokémon collectors always buys a few booster packs and asks us to keep them behind the counter for when we sell out. Then if a kid comes in disappointed that we don’t have any or someone comes in that can’t afford a pack, we hand over the prepaid packs. The look on their faces is precious!
In your opinion, why is it so important for people to support their local hobby shops?
It’s crucial we can stop online scalpers and ensure real collectors and players get hold of their cards. We also have lots of kids that come in on a Friday afternoon with their pocket money for a booster pack. We would implore everyone to buy local and not online. Many people nowadays are spending silly money with scalpers who only do what they do because people are prepared to spend silly money with them. Support local businesses to get products into your hands at reasonable prices.
What are your plans for the future and where can people find you?
While we don’t have space to run events, we would love to consider demo days and “learn to play” sessions in the future. For now, we’re kept busy running the business day to day and enjoy meeting new people!
You can find us at 42a Northgate, Peebles, EH45 8BZ and we’re most active online on Facebook. Follow us to see all our latest products and releases.
It’s our aim to visit and speak with all of the TCG shops in Scotland and we were delighted to have the opportunity to interview the owner Bus Stop Toy Shop in Largs. We were very excited to sit down with Duncan as his shop is one of the oldest hobby shops in the country. His dedication to inclusion and community building is inspirational and we hope you enjoy this piece as much as we enjoyed putting it together!
Can you tell us your role and give us a little bit of history about the shop and how you got started?
I’m Duncan Conner and I am the owner of Bus Stop Toy Shop (BSTS). We’ve been around for 19 years now. We are one of the oldest organised play stores in Scotland. We make a lot of jokes when people come in from other stores about how they play at BSTS Tribute acts and things like that. I’ve been doing this since the beginning of organised play for a lot of different card games.
How did we get here? It was an accident! There really only were one or two gaming stores in Scotland when we started, for a long time before that, you were able to play War Games and Games Workshop, for instance. And you had the likes of Highlander Games in Dundee who were around before us. Our business model of an organised play store really wasn’t all that well established. We started out selling generic toys but with a geeky slant to them. And then the rest kind of happened by accident. Games Workshop got in touch and offered me an account and I let my heart rule my head and I started stocking some Games Workshop miniatures because my childhood background was all about miniatures. I was a role-playing game enthusiast and I still play Dungeons and Dragons now. And so I thought, why not? Let’s try stocking Warhammer.
I then started to stock trading cards as one day I was short of a minimum order with a supplier and someone said, you should put a box of Yu-Gi-Oh cards on the counter. I knew nothing about trading card games at this stage because that was after my childhood. I put a box of Yu-Gi-Oh cards on the counter and suddenly within a very short space of time I was selling more hobby related products than traditional toys. So then we accidentally became an organised play store.
That actually happened by accident because of a set of trading cards called Doctor Who Battles in Time. At the time, every kid in the country was collecting these trading cards and suppliers were limiting the quantity we could get every week. Sounds kind of familiar in 2025. I was making no money off it so I thought, why don’t we at least bring a lot of people into the store and run a swap meet for them? And then as the weeks progressed doing that, I noticed they were also swapping Yu-Gi-Oh cards. At the time, interestingly, Pokemon and Magic were a little bit in the doldrums and Yu-Gi-Oh was the most popular game on the planet. Eventually I said, well, this Yu-Gi-Oh is a game, isn’t it? That’s how naive I was. If you want to actually play with each other, just sit down on the floor and do it. At the time, there were shelves all around the shop and within a few weeks, we’d started to have some tables and we were making it up as we went along. We knew nothing about what we were doing. There was no organised play system for any of the games other than Magic at the time. So we were literally learning on the job and accidentally created a hobby store.
What would you say are the main specialisms that you have in the shop? What card games are the most popular here?
For most of the last half a dozen years, our number one sailer has been Magic: The Gathering. I think like every card store on the planet, MTG has been supplanted by Pokemon in the last year or so. Obviously, Pokemon had a huge amount of hype during lockdown, then died away and then suddenly out of nowhere, the tail end of last year came roaring back and Pokemon is currently enjoying bigger popularity, probably even more than when it came out 29 years ago. Beyond that in card games, Yu-Gi-Oh is in third spot. After that we have the smaller games like Disney Lorcana, Star Wars Unlimited, Digimon and One Piece. Last week we had the Godzilla card game come out. There was a bit of interest here from our locals and then this weekend we have Gundam coming out. But no, in order one, two, three at the moment is Pokemon, Magic then Yu-Gi-Oh.
What have you found to be the reception for some of these newer card games?
I never try to lose sight of the fact we’re in a town with 9,000 people living in it. We’re not in the city centre. So getting enough momentum behind anything that’s not the big three can be a challenge. Lorcana is an interesting one. Over the years, I’ve seen so many card games come out to a fair amount of hype. Often they’ll just about catch up, as I’ve seen Yu-Gi-Oh third place in terms of sales and player numbers here. You’ll see a card game just about catching up with Yu-Gi-Oh then after a couple of years, it goes horribly wrong.
Lorcana has the might of Disney behind it and a long-term plan for the game. It’s going to be interesting to see if it can sustain that momentum in the coming years. We’ve just had the announcements of the first set rotations in Lorcana, which has been met with an interesting reaction. Seems to have sent the price of set one through the roof and crashed the price of sets two through four. There’s so much that Disney could still do. They’ve hardly scratched the surface of their IP yet and every new year the IP they go into is going to draw in a different fan base. So out of all the games that have tried to take on the Big Three over the last 20 years, I think Lorcana has got the best chance of managing to sustain it.
Star Wars Unlimited at the moment is doing very well here. Launch of a set last week and that’s going well as a possible popular set. Digimon is dying away and it’ll be interesting to see what Godzilla and Gundam do in the next few months.
What is the TCG scene like in this area and what are the variety of events that you typically put on?
Largs has a population of 9,000, but we are relatively close to the three towns of Saltcoats, Ardrosssan and Stevenson and relatively close to Greenock as well. We do have a decent catchment area of people where we are their nearest store. We don’t have a million people on our doorstep. So finding the player numbers for minor games is always going to be a challenge for us. We do tend to focus very heavily on the big games.
If you look down our board of weekly events, there’s Magic: The Gathering, role-playing game clubs, Warhammer, and Pokemon which happens three times a week. We also have Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon and Beyblade League at the moment as well. All fairly mainstream games. The only ones that are out with the mainstream there are probably Digimon and Beyblade. The rest all focus around the biggest war game (Warhammer), the biggest role-playing game (Dungeons and Dragons), and then the three big card games. But we do something six days out of the seven every week and we’re open late nights just about every night. So we’re kept busy despite the size of the local area!
What is your capacity for hosting competitive events? Do you get a lot of players travelling to the shop for tournaments?
Our main shop here has seating for 16 to 20 people at a push. We also have the upper floor of the shop next to us with seating for another 24 people comfortably. The shop typically reaches capacity when we have a Pokemon League Cup; we see players from Aberdeen and Dundee to Glasgow and Edinburgh!
The other one that people are really keen to travel for at the moment is Lorcana Set Championships. The Lorcana community in the west of Scotland seems to be very proactive in trying to support every store that wants to run Set Championships and making sure there’s enough people at each of them. It’s truly appreciated when all these people rock up from all over Scotland every time we’re going to host a Set Championship. It’s lovely to see them and it’s been a breath of fresh air, the way that the Lorcana community is working together to try and make their game a success. It’s really nice to see.
How do you try to create a welcoming and friendly environment for newcomers to the hobby as well in general, having an inclusive place for people to visit?
I always say that there’s only one rule at BSTS and that is: everyone gets a game. We live and die by those four words. It means much more to me than just coming in, sitting down and playing. It means we’re inclusive and we’re welcoming and everybody’s welcome here provided you treat everybody else who walks through the door as being as welcome as you are. I think it’s because I bang on about it so much, it’s kind of bred into our customers as well that as soon as a new face walks through the door, we are going to look after them. We’re going to give them all the help they need to learn a new game. We’re going to support them while we play their first few games. Typically, newcomers often wind up walking away with a dozen new Facebook friends and talking long into the night about the first steps in building competitive decks and things like that. It is a really welcoming, friendly place and I’ve got my loyal regulars to thank for that.
Apart from being one of the oldest organised play shops in Scotland, what would you say makes BSTS unique?
It’s kind of difficult to be unique now in this industry. What sets us apart? Sheer will and determination. I’ve seen so many stores come and make a big splash and not manage to survive in the long term. And just having the fight to keep the place alive and keep it open for next year and for the year after that, and for the next generation of people that want to come play here. There’s a lot easier ways out there to make a living. If I didn’t care personally about the community coming here, then why would I do it? Putting the community at the heart of everything we do is the be all and end all for me.
Have you found it difficult to keep stock secure recently? What precautions have you implemented against scalpers and resellers?
Absolutely. I’m never going to criticise somebody that collects sealed products. That is a legitimate thing to do and you enjoy your collection your own way. Trying to keep scalpers away from my limited stock is a subject that’s dear to the hearts of any store owner at the moment. We are fighting our best, trying to put the limited product we’re getting into the hands of genuine collectors and keep it off eBay. But it’s tough. I’m not going to say every single product that’s ever bought in here is going into the hands of a collector, of course. We’re not shipping any Pokemon products at the moment. We’re doing store collection only. We’re limiting quantities.
We are even doing daft stuff like changing product URLs so they can’t be loaded into bots for when restocks come along. We’re fighting a good fight and trying to make sure that genuine collectors and players get as much of the products that they want. We do have some sort of mechanisms in place to make sure our regular Pokemon player base has access to enough cards to continue to play the game because that is a threat to Pokemon at the moment, the players just find cards too hard to acquire and give up trying. So we’re working hard at that.
Why do you think it’s important that people go and support their local game store?
There’s essentially two reasons for that. If you want to have these wonderful, inclusive places that gaming stores are, I was banging on about how welcoming we are, but that’s true of virtually any gaming store you go into then, equally, if you want these places to exist when you’re purchasing products for your hobby, you’ve got to go and support them. We know that sometimes you can go and find products 5, 10, 20% cheaper on the internet somewhere. Every time you shop at a local gaming store, you are keeping your hobby alive. From a collector’s point of view, if you are a long-term collector, obviously the current Pokemon bubble won’t last forever. And we’ll see all these news agents, all the big box toy retailers, your WHS Smiths etc. As soon as Pokemon’s not hot anymore, these businesses are just going to drop it. It’ll be gaming stores like us, still looking after and promoting the brand, provided we’re still around to do so! And so that’s another reason why your first choice should always be to go and support a local gaming store if you possibly can.
As part of our mission to shine a light on local trading card game communities across Scotland, we sat down with Thistle Tavern Games Hub, a welcoming and growing TCG shop based on Aberdeen’s high street. Now celebrating their first full year as a retail shop, Thistle Tavern has quickly become a hub for players and collectors in the area. In this interview, we chat to Stuart about how they got started, what the local scene is like, and what they’ve learned along the way.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your role at Thistle Tavern and how it got started?
I’m Stuart. My business partner, Andrew, and I previously worked together. Andrew was instrumental in getting me back into Magic: The Gathering. We regularly played at a local shop in Aberdeen called Reset, which functioned as both a LAN Cafe and a Local Game Store (LGS). Unfortunately, Reset closed its doors at the beginning of 2023. While other stores remained in Aberdeen, we felt they didn’t quite align with our desired atmosphere. We believed we could cultivate a more tailored environment for trading card game players.
The Genesis of Thistle Tavern
We initially launched a website, ThistleTavern.com, primarily to gauge market interest and assess if we could generate sufficient income to support a physical gaming space in Aberdeen. Aberdeen has experienced an economic downturn, but this has also spurred initiatives like ‘Our Union Street’ and Aberdeen City Council Grants, which offer incentives for new businesses to open on Union Street. After a year of operating the website, it showed promising revenue. We concluded, “We can likely afford rent somewhere. In the worst-case scenario, even without foot traffic, we can still cover our expenses,” given that Andrew and I were both still working full-time. Consequently, Thistle Tavern Games Hub will mark its one-year anniversary on June 29th!
Overwhelming Success
Since opening Thistle Tavern Games Hub on Union Street, we’ve been genuinely overwhelmed by the store’s success. The community’s response to having a dedicated TCG-focused game shop has been phenomenal. We host groups virtually every night and are often at near capacity daily.
Recognising this growth, Andrew transitioned to full-time work at the store in early April this year. He now primarily oversees stock procurement and business expansion. My focus has shifted to business development, and our store manager, Marcus, handles the day-to-day operations alongside Chloe, Joel and Reece. We believe a crucial element of our success lies in identifying and embracing our niche. Andrew and I are passionate TCG and board game players ourselves. Andrew, in particular, is a highly skilled trading card game player with a strong competitive history dating back to age 12. His deep understanding of the communities and the scene, what works and what doesn’t for various games, is invaluable. We’re always eager to explore new games and give them a chance, and I think our customers appreciate that we genuinely understand the hobby.
What are the specialisms within the shop?
Magic: The Gathering is undoubtedly a cornerstone of any TCG business. Our Commander nights consistently remain our most popular event by far, closely followed by Yu-Gi-Oh. We boast a very active Yu-Gi-Oh community; in fact, many are currently in Liverpool for a tournament, with Marcus joining them for the weekend, which is fantastic to see.
Flesh and Blood is Andrew’s primary game at the moment, and he has achieved significant success with it. We now have an active Flesh and Blood player base of 12 to 15 individuals. I personally enjoy Lorcana, and we have a dedicated group that has been playing regularly at the store since the game’s launch a year ago.
Beyond these, we cater to a wide array of games, including Shadowverse Evolved, Weiss Schwarz, and we’re planning events for Gundam andRiftbound. Ultimately, if people want to come in and play a card game, we aim to provide the space. The TCG market has experienced considerable growth over the past few years, particularly Pokémon, where demand has been exceptionally high.
What approach have you taken in terms of being able to stock products? How have you found balancing the demand between the most popular games and newer ones?
Andrew works diligently to ensure we maintain ample stock on our shelves. Our goal is to be the store that offers a comprehensive selection and sufficient product for our players. We collaborate with several distributors, and Andrew is continuously exploring new sources to meet demand.
Battling Scalpers and Bots
The popularity of games like Pokémon, however, presents challenges. As a game store with an online presence, we contend with scalpers and bots. This has necessitated the implementation of specific policies. For instance, customers can purchase products at RRP, but we will unseal the box. If a sealed box is desired, the market price applies, as we can typically infer their intent.
We’ve also imposed restrictions on certain product sales during pre-release nights: participation in the pre-release event grants purchasing privileges. If a customer isn’t playing the game, we generally prefer not to sell our limited stock, as it’s intended for our community. This is unfortunately the current reality of the TCG market due to stock limitations.
Despite these challenges, the hobby is undeniably growing. We’re seeing an increasing number of players, and we strive to balance stocking enough product for our local community while simultaneously growing our online business.
Thistle Tavern also has a well curated selection of board games for sale. Do you host any kind of board game nights in the shop? What is your approach to events?
That’s an interesting question. We did attempt to host board game nights when we first opened. As a board gamer myself, I try to meet with friends weekly to play. However, from a business perspective, TCGs consistently attract recurring, week-on-week players. We’ve definitely leaned more into that. Honestly, space is now our primary limitation. If we had more room, we would likely explore cultivating more dedicated board game nights or D&D nights.
Our current focus remains on TCGs, as that’s where our players’ demand lies, and we’re content with that. The board game selection is important for attracting street traffic, as it offers a more accessible entry point into the hobby than TCGs. We’re continually working to find the right balance of integrating the board game hobby with the TCG hobby.
When visiting the shop, we also noticed you have a small selection of snacks. We understand that some shops like to have a cafe style offering. What was your approach with this?
It’s definitely something we kept in mind and ultimately we wanted to focus on the games. While we value the importance of snacks and drinks, we didn’t want to over-complicate things. There are lots of great takeaways nearby and people are more than welcome to bring their own food into the shop, as long as they are considerate of course. As you noted, the financial margins for food can be appealing to card shops considering a cafe element.
What do you think makes the shop unique compared to some of the other ones that are in Aberdeen already?
I think it’s definitely that we have this slightly more competitive edge. We encourage our players to get better when they’re playing so that they can go on and travel. That’s been a big part of why Andrew enjoyed playing card games as you get to travel and see the world playing these games.
We try to cultivate a fun atmosphere, but there is a level of competition to it that you don’t necessarily get at other stores. We host larger events at the weekend to try and encourage that approach; for instance, tournaments to win a box, win a case, special promos with higher entry fees to support it.
Why do you think it’s important that the community and trading card game players should support their local game shop? What’s stopping people from sitting at home and playing with their friends?
That’s exactly why me and Andrew wanted to open a store. Not everyone has the space at home to invite their friends around and play. And if you’ve got a family, you can’t always be at home playing with your mates. So having a space that is open and welcoming so that anyone, regardless of their financial situation, can come and play.
In terms of why it’s important that you pay a little bit more from your local games shop compared to Amazon or buy your singles from us instead of Cardmarket. I mean, the truth is we have bills to pay. Like I say, Andrew’s now going full-time, so his family is on the line. He is trying to commit to this so that we can build a good business and a good community.
We hope that people enjoy coming in, speaking to the staff and speaking to the other players and meeting new people, especially from our perspective when it comes to trading card games. Playing with more diverse players is going to help increase your skill. That’s an absolute fact and one that we think is really important for trading card game players.
Can you tell us about a moment interacting with a customer or at an event in the shop that you are quite fond of?
A recent one was our Lorcana Championships. We had to put a 32 player limit on it because there just wasn’t enough space in the shop. As soon as we announced that, we almost sold out all our tickets. The Lorcana community are dedicated and players travel up to compete.
The tournament organisers recently changed it so that there wouldn’t be a second place playmat. So I had this idea, “we’ll use a retail playmat and get everybody to sign it and give that to the person that comes second place”. It was a really nice group of players getting together and having fun. Everyone wanted to sign the mat at the end of the day and we gave it out as a prize.
It’s just little things like that that I think give a uniqueness to an event that just makes it worthwhile.
How do you see the future of Thistle Tavern, but also the wider Scotland TCG community developing in the future?
Future Growth
It’s definitely one that we want to help support, and certainly from a Thistle Tavern perspective, we’re hoping to grow and continue to expand over the coming years. That could lead to more shops and more locations around Scotland. It could mean a bigger presence in Aberdeen that is able to host and bring bigger events. That’s what we’re really missing from a TCG space in Aberdeen, or Scotland generally, the big events. We need regional and national championships. We want to bring those styles of events to Scotland. We’re pushing very hard with Flesh and Blood to try and make that happen.
Scotland TCG Community
We’re going to be at Tabletop Scotland in September with a stall to let the wider Scotland community know that we exist because I don’t necessarily think that’s true yet. I like being part of these conventions and bigger events. We’re always there, we’re helping buy and sell cards, which in itself is really useful for players because if you’re stuck with cards and nobody, no store or no place to trade with, we’re going to try and be there so that at least once every few months you’ve got an option to come in tp offload your old cards and get some new ones that you need.
I think that’s where Scotland as a whole needs to band together to try and showcase to these tournament organisers that Scotland is a viable venue and people are willing to turn out in force for these events if they are in Scotland.
What are your closing thoughts you would like to share, either about the shop or the community as a whole?
Just my thanks! Again, like I say, I want to thank our community. I want to thank the wider community. We’ve had folk travel in, the one-piece players in Inverness come down to play, they’re great. The Lorcana community in Arbroath and Dundee come to the store to play. We’ve had groups from Glasgow and Edinburgh, they’ll travel for Magic.
I think it is important that the community as a whole is recognised. It’s like a fun welcoming community, just a broad thanks to everybody for helping us get our feet under us in our first year.
Where else can people find you if they’re new or just finding out about you? Whereabouts is the shop, what socials are you most active on?
Thistle Tavern is located in Union Street in Aberdeen. We are also on Thistletavern.com. We are semi-active on our social media, but our Discord community is probably the best place.
We’re hoping to be a little bit more active on X and Facebook and Instagram going forward. And that’s part of our growth strategy. We’re also working with marketing agencies to help us promote us in the best light.
You can find more details about Thistle Tavern in our Shop Directory.
