listen. Have a card trick you like. You look it up in the book, you understand these weird diagrams, and you understand it semi-directly in your mind. You find a deck of cards, hold them in your hand, and re-interpret those weird graphs – they seem to have changed, and now you have actual cards to hold – and then what? Then you practice. Alone, on the couch, by the window, in front of the mirror, as you should, you practice and practice. Finally you have the trick. Everything is so elegant. Connections are invisible. The elasticity and flow of the card deeply delights your soul. Even patterns follow. It’s all good.
Then you try the trick in front of other people and it totally falls apart.
I think that’s a good part of Card Shark’s appeal. You study, you practice, and you perform—but all of a sudden, the cards feel weird and seem to want to stick together. Sweating suddenly occurs where it shouldn’t be. All of a sudden you have two hands and it feels like at least one is too much. disaster.
Card Shark is great. It’s a game about a card game, but it’s not a card game itself – not really. It’s a game of skill, but you’re in a world of liars, not magicians. The scene is eighteenth-century France, with wigs, corruption and a candlelight conspiracy. Chasing clues to the conspiracy, you and a handful of friendly thieves must work your way through the stacked decks of high society to find the trump card as you progress.
It’s an adventure and a puzzle. On your adventure, you can choose where to go as France slowly opens its doors to you. You learn as much as you can about the mystery surrounding you and try to find out who among your fellow citizens can be trusted.
But the main action is always at the table. As the story progresses, you’ll learn new techniques that make the cards work in your favor — learn, learn, and learn; until the end, there’s a lot to learn about this game, which is probably the most daring thing in the design. You then encourage your score to give you all their money, making sure you gradually raise your stakes so as not to make them nervous and try to keep your tricks and tricks out of sight.
Tricks and tricks! One of the problems with Card Shark is that the cards themselves are very attractive things. Shuffles, booms, pedantic squares – these are all beautiful aspects of cards that can’t be easily conveyed in digital media, and that’s before you get the rippling grunt or lightning snap of a really good card spring . The ace hits the table. If I’m playing a game about poker cheating, part of me wants to feel the cards in my hand. What should I do?
Card Shark has two responses to this. The first is the visual design, which uses monochrome printing and – I think – watercolors, as well as some lovely Noggin-the-Nog-style animations, to provide an overwhelming sense of a world itself made of paper. The sky has delicate threads and grooves that might remind you of the fine etchings of old money. Figures bend at fixed joints, like elaborate two-dimensional puppets in a children’s theater. Candlelight is a bouquet of red and purple flowers that seeps into the surroundings, while the columns, windows and vaulted ceiling are treated with brisk brushstrokes, a dynamic sketch: disciplined eyes and wild minds.
The second reaction is that while Card Shark doesn’t give you 52 cards to move in your hand, its rigor pretty much balances this. Few are fake. Its tricks are built up gradually from a series of parts – sneak peeks while pouring, signal cards to accomplices, palms, loading decks, fake shuffles and more sophisticated card controls. All of these things are handled by manipulating a thumbstick and timing buttons a few times, but as one technique is combined with another – a glimpse of someone’s hand combined with the signals you’ve seen in earlier examples Together – it’s starting to feel like a complex technical, mechanical, mental process, and that’s exactly what it looks like if you actually own the cards. Dexterity, memory and speed of movement and the ability to focus on those who in turn focus on you. Not only does Card Shark teach you something that will get you killed in Vegas, it also manages to solve the fascinating paradox behind the entire business: It takes hard work, practice, and skill to be good at cheating.
I should point out here: I’m a sucker for this stuff. Give me a false shuffle or power and I’m anyone’s. But I think Card Shark also has the ability to win new friends. Like a good card trick, it combines elements of simplicity in increasingly subtle ways as the game increases in risk and complexity. One minute you’re learning how to jog a card so your friend always gets the ace while everyone else ends up with beans and horsehair, the next you’re reading cards by watching them in a mirrored cigarette case The reflections to deal with them itself move around the surface of the captain’s table deep in the sailboat.
There is joy here – the joy of mastering impossible skills and stealing from nobles. But Card Shark’s real talent is fear. It’s become more and more a fear, with every new game, every new country house, and the sound of a higher, deadlier run of the social ladder. If it sounds unlikely that someone can track the ace’s journey through the deck that’s allegedly being shuffled, well, it is – and getting it where you want it to go will be trickier. You have to learn all of them: theory, physics of control, and that’s it. Then you’re not only playing it with your opponent’s frustration rising, but you’re constantly playing the nerve-wracking score, all the carillon chests, slow horns and dart strings.
If you can handle it all, there’s a lot of fun here. Card Shark is a game that provides controls for handling a deck of cards that another game might use to cast spells – does it really make a difference? After all, magic and theft come together in the form of cards and coins, and always have.
It reminded me of a story about Ricky Jay, a great and fondly remembered close-up magician and historian of magic. After performing a particularly dazzling poker control for the New Yorker writer, he was asked if there were still people in the world who would still play poker with him.
“Of course,” he replied. “stupid people.”
