Card Shark lets the player learn the finer tricks of the trade as an aid to an experienced cheater. The game appears to be about card games, but in reality it revolves around the many tricks out there to deceive other players. While the main characters steal a lot of money from their opponents, they also unravel a mystery involving the king of France. Card Shark is a fun game, but not easy. Some tricks have many steps and once you have learned twenty tricks, it is sometimes difficult to remember how one of the previous tricks was put together. In addition, the explanation that the game gives for a trick is not always clear, so you sometimes do not know exactly what you are doing wrong. Apart from those kinds of frustrating moments, Card Shark is an entertaining and regularly exciting game. The game is not long, but with a cost of two tens it makes a little less difference. Add to that the picturesque look and the cleverly written conversations and you have a great snack for the Nintendo Switch or Windows.
Pros
- Challenging game
- many tricks
- Beautiful scenic look
- Nicely written
Cons
- Pretty spicy game
- Sometimes too unclear explanation
- Not very long
We all know the scene from western movies in which a number of people of dubious character have gathered at the table of the local saloon. Money, whiskey and cards fly across the table until someone stands up and pulls out a revolver: they are cheating. That’s exactly the scenario you’re trying to avoid in Card Shark. The game is not set in the Wild West, but in eighteenth-century France. The player is not an outlaw, but a French young man who cannot speak. He is taken under his wing by the Comte de Saint-Germain . This French count not only introduces the player to the higher echelons of French society, but also teaches him the intricacies of cards, or rather: the intricacies of how to cheat with cards.
Card Shark is not about a card game. In fact, at no point in the game is it clear which deck is being played on the table. Trying to win fairly is therefore not an option: everything revolves around the techniques that the count teaches the player with which card games can be manipulated. That can be done in many ways. The further you progress in the story, the more methods the count will teach you and the more options you will have. In most chapters it is fixed which trick you use, but sometimes you can also make your own choice in which tactic you want to use.
Secretly peeking
It all starts quite simple. The Count teaches you how to quickly see what cards he has in his hand while refilling someone’s glass. You pour the glass, glance at the cards, and then wipe the table with a cloth. The way you do that tells the count of which suit his opponent has the most cards in his hand. Does he have three hearts? Then you swipe three circles clockwise. Four panes? That’s four times moving your canvas up and down. It is one of the simplest techniques, but immediately there are some snags involved. For example, while your eyes are on the other player’s cards, be careful not to let the glass overflow. That arouses suspicion. You also have to perform the sweeping technique as quickly as possible, otherwise that also arouses mistrust. That distrust is continuously displayed at the bottom of the screen. Your target starts on the far left, in green, but grows more suspicious until it reaches red. If your target gets to the very end of the beam, you’ll run into the lamp. In eighteenth-century France, that often means a bloody end, thanks to a gun, sword or dagger.
Meeting with death
That provides a nice side step that you will sooner or later encounter, because later techniques become more complicated and then you automatically make a mistake. What follows next depends on the difficulty you are playing Card Shark on. On the hardest level, death is really dead: end exercise, start over. At a lower level, however, you get to sit down with death itself. A conversation then follows that can go in all kinds of directions. For example, every now and then you can choose to use one of your learned card tricks to trick death. At other times, death just wants a chat, or takes some of your earned money. Anyway, death eventually sends you back to Earth and you wake up just before the scene that just killed you.
The chats with death become less interesting after a while, especially if you come across them too often. Even death marvels at how often you are in front of it, but it is never afraid to give you another chance. Fortunately, because as said: Card Shark quickly becomes a lot more complicated than simply peeking and telling your partner what cards the opponent has. You often come to sit at the table. Then you can’t just look into someone’s cards, but you can play all kinds of other tricks.
This is where Card Shark gets trickier. You will soon learn a technique for sticking cards, in other words: putting them in a specific order, so that they are dealt in the right way for you. That starts with finding a card, which you hold back or secretly fish from the deck. Then, by placing other cards on top of it, you must place that card in the correct place, so that it ends up with the compte. After that you still have to make sure that you don’t lose the cards in the deck, so you put another card just a bit skewed, so you know that underneath is your prepared pile. This base can be expanded in all kinds of ways, because the compte, or one of the other players, has to make a ‘cut’. Also with this split of the deck you have to know where ‘your’ cards are and you learn tricks for that too. All in all, that becomes a nice load of actions to remember and a small mistake is quickly made. Many mistakes can no longer be repaired and therefore irrevocably lead to a lost lap. Sometimes that’s not a bad thing. It can even ensure that your opponents regain some confidence in you and the compte and you can also benefit from a small mistake. However, a mistake can also mean that a cunning trick is spotted by your fellow players and that causes problems, as described earlier. It can even ensure that your opponents regain some confidence in you and the compte and you can also benefit from a small mistake. However, a mistake can also mean that a cunning trick is spotted by your fellow players and that causes problems, as described earlier. It can even ensure that your opponents regain some confidence in you and the compte and you can also benefit from a small mistake. However, a mistake can also mean that a cunning trick is spotted by your fellow players and that causes problems, as described earlier.
Unclear instructions
Learning all kinds of different tricks is fun and, for the most part, doable. However, there are also times when Card Shark could have provided a little more guidance. For example, it happened a number of times that we made a mistake in a series of actions, but did not immediately realize where it went wrong. The game then offers the only option to go through the entire explanation again, but it does not help you detect your weak spot. If the explanation about that wasn’t clear enough, it won’t help you either. It can therefore happen that you run into some frustration before you realize exactly what the game is asking of you. That also happened when the game taught us swordsmanship. Due to the somewhat unclear instructions, we needed some time to learn what exactly the intention was while playing. no disaster,
Card Shark is therefore a game that revolves around cheating at cards. However, that’s not the whole story. The reason the compte de Saint-Germain takes you on a tour of France is that it’s on the trail of a mystery, and playing people broke at a card table has proven to be an effective method of acquiring information. What starts out as seemingly meaningless cards, quickly turns into detective work by the Compte and his silent companion.
The whole story is told through stylish, two-dimensional drawings that seem to be almost moving paintings. It’s a static style, but one that fits well with the game. Much more is not necessary: it is mainly about the cards. Yet the backgrounds in which everything takes place show sufficient detail and it is not even an exaggeration to describe some of those backgrounds as art. In any case, it always gives Card Shark a pleasant appearance. The sound is limited to some background music and sound effects, which in both cases is quite well done, but rarely noticeable.
Conclusion
Card Shark offers a fun adventure that, when you look at it clinically, relies on a myriad of small mini-games. Those mini-games come in the form of devious tricks with cards, with which you mislead your opponents in the game. Those tricks are for the most part easy to do, but can be tricky at times because they contain many parts or depend on timing. That sometimes makes Card Shark a pretty difficult game, where we also note that here and there the explanation of a trick or action could have been better. Ultimately, it should not spoil the fun and Card Shark is above all an entertaining game. It is not a game that you will play again soon, because after a while some actions are quite repetitive and you may not feel like learning all the tricks again, but that is not a bad thing. Card Shark offers enough entertainment for two bucks. Note that it is not a useful game for moments when you cannot play concentrated: with many of the tricks you have to pay attention and speed is almost always a factor. Playing when you’re a little distracted by something else leads to sub-optimal results.