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dkirschner's Card Shark (PC)

[November 12, 2024 06:18:10 PM]

This gives me vibes of Pentiment in style. The art is beautiful, very painterly, and if you watch the backgrounds, they kind of move or “dance” with shimmering particles, especially indoors. It’s set in 18th century France and you find yourself caught up in national political intrigue. The story is intriguing, the writing is sharp and witty, the concept is creative.

Card Shark is a game about cheating at cards. You play as a mute man, and you are taken under the wing of an infamous ex-noble/socialite turned conman. He teaches you card tricks as you travel around the country swindling rich people out of their money. Your targets are often chosen not just for their wealth, but because they have information, and your handler (and, it turns out, his handlers) is trying to unravel a mystery that will have huge implications for the country’s political class.

The card tricks start off easy. For example, you pour wine for an opponent, steal a glance at his cards, and signal with your hand which suit he has the most of. Or, you shuffle the cards, but palm an ace to deal to your handler. There are 28 tricks, or combinations of tricks, and the complexity escalates like crazy by the end. Here is the "tutorial" text when you are taught the next-to-final trick for the final card game. You'll do this long part after you interpret a code to give two specific types of cards to your ally. You’ll palm one card to deal to your ally and then sweep cards in a specific order according to the code to get the second card. Then, you get the following tutorial explanation, with visuals:

“First off, I need you to shuffle once whilst injogging the top card at the same time. Subtlety is key here so make sure you do this in one fluid motion. Nice job. We’ve already set aside two cards for me, your target, so now it’s time to sort out the other players. Go ahead and drop two cards per additional player. Now each player has two cards prepared for them. To secure the selection, outjog the next card. Outjogging is just like injogging, but the card pokes out away from you instead of in and towards you. Here, see, the outjogged card and injogged card are on either side of your stack. Your thumb can easily create a gap beneath the injogged card when you’re squaring the deck. And you’ll naturally grab everything up to the outjogged card, too. This creates a break below it. You can use these gaps to restore the stack on the next pass through the deck. Good. You know how this part goes. Shuffle down and injog in one motion. Now drop a pair of cards for each player besides myself. Now for that outjog we talked about to sandwich the stack. Good. The prepared cards will be easy to find thanks to those markers on either side. Go ahead and shuffle down the rest of the deck like the honest man you are. Then square as I showed you. With the deck squared, you need to drop all the cards up to the first gap. That way you can get back to dealing with the stack you’re preparing. Now my two cards are at the bottom of the stack. But they need to be distributed amongst the opponents’ cards. To distribute the planned cards in the stack, you’ll need to drop one individual card for everyone other than your target. The next card should be for me…But the ones you prepared are on either side of the next break. Drop everything up to the break. That should be my card with a card for each opponent above it. Great. Now there are two cards prepared for each of my opponents. But there’s only one for me, currently. Drop that next card to make sure both cards I requested end up in the same hand. Now you just need to offset the stack so that the requested cards are dealt to me. Simply drop as many cards as there are opponents seated before me in the deal. Look at that! Both cards are on track to end up in my hand. But in your celebrations don’t forget to secure your stack by injogging the next card. With the stack secured, all that’s left is to drop the rest of the pack and cut the deck at the marker. Let’s see what happens when you deal out the cards. Good job. The two low red cards are dealt to me. You’ll finish by reversing the opponents’ cut."

You will have to do this by yourself under the pressure of increasingly suspicious opponents, with money (and your life) on the line. Each instruction and term in the description above is a specific motion. The small parts form the whole trick. Also, in real time, players are not necessarily sitting in the order that they are in the tutorial, or there may be a different number of players, and the cards you need to hold may be high or low cards, which changes the number and order of the drops and all that. AND, in the very last card game, you not only have to give two cards to one player, but you also have to give two different cards to TWO different players, and you have to figure that part out on your own. It’s so complicated! So complicated, in fact, that I threw my hands up at the end and watched a YouTube video of the last card game. No shame! A read part of an AMA with the devs, and apparently this game turned a lot of people on to magic tricks. Tracks. Totally unique game, worth checking out.