There’s a card trick you like.
Finally you have the trick down.
Everything’s so elegant.
The joins are invisible.
The flex and flow of the cards is deeply pleasing to your soul.
Even the patter is coming along.
It all works beautifully.
And then you try the trick in front of other people and it completely falls apart.
Card Shark review
This is a good part of the appeal of Card Shark, I think.
Suddenly there’s sweat where there shouldn’t be sweat.
Suddenly you have two hands, as it were, and that feels like at least one too many.
Card Shark is brilliant.
It’s a game about card games, but it isn’t a card game itself - not really.
It’s a game about tricks, but you’re in a world of con artists rather than magicians.
The setting is eighteenth century France with its wigs and corruption and candlelit intrigue.
It’s an adventure and a puzzle.
In the adventure you choose where to go as France slowly opens up to you.
But the main action always plays out at a card table.
One of the problems facing Card Shark is that cards themselves are inordinately charismatic things.
Card Shark has two responses to this.
Skies have delicate whorls and furrows that might put you in mind of the filigreed etching of old money.
Characters bend at fixed joints like delicate two-dimensional puppets in a children’s theatre.
It fakes very little.
I should point out here: I am a sucker for this stuff.
Show me a false shuffle or a force and I’m anybody’s.
But I think Card Shark has the ability to win new people over too.
There is joy here - the joy of mastering unlikely skills and stealing from the aristocracy.
But Card Shark’s real flair is for dread.
If you might handle all that, there is so much to enjoy here.
Magic and thievery come together in cards and coins after all, and always have done.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Silly people.”
