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.
