Card Shark Tips for Beginners

Card Shark is a dizzying lesson in card manipulation. He pins Nicolai Troshinky’s admiration for Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon to Arnaud de Bock (Reigns, Pikuniku) and Nerial’s resume of designing intuitive puzzles that embrace creative thinking. It follows a mute young man on the run who plays out his life in an alternate history of 18th-century France in a very devolved way, sprinkled with pirates, powdered wigs, fencing duels, monoprint paintings of French architecture and neighboring campaigns, and of a hidden royal plot. titled The Twelve Bottles of Milk.

This is for a card cheating game, but that’s the point. Card Shark features more than 20 different cheat techniques derived from real-life iterations of card marking and deck switching, and it balances its quirks with mini-games and three difficulty levels that test your memory and quick thinking in challenging situations. high stress scenarios. The tension can be deafening, so we’ve put together a quick guide on how to cheat in 18th-century French society without getting caught.

Focus on cheating, not winning

Despite what you may think, Card Shark is not about playing cards. It never really reveals what card game is played in Agen, Espalion, Marseille and other scenic parts of southwestern France, and instead convinces you to minimize the variables and focus on what’s matters most: performing a cheat. As the Comte de St-Germain’s accomplice, hand values ​​are meaningless and players are responsible for executing the precise implementation of new strategies in order to help him win the game and prevent other players from turning a simple trick into an inevitable consequence.

Be smart (and careful) about betting

Timing is everything. Raising a bet at any table has its benefits (bigger payout, spicy gameplay), but doing it in the early rounds of a stage will only increase your opponent’s suspicion meter. Max it out and the table will dissolve for the night. Or in some cases call your head. Raising the bet in farming areas (i.e. The Barn) can help with stages that require a purse and higher entry fee, and with enough coins you can fail at least one times per scene and continue to progress through the main story.

Develop your own memory techniques

Card Shark’s cheat strategies vary from the simple (The Three Card Monte) to the absurdly complex (The Baby False Shuffle) and the use of pattern recognition and memorization can help anyone stuck in a bind. Techniques like The Bottle Of Cahors and The Indiscreet Fingers are used to signal an opponent’s strongest card suit and can benefit from applying a phrase to a specific suit and action (i.e. i.e. “full heart” = wiping the table clockwise) or creating an acronym for individual ranking cards (AKQJ = Ashton Kutcher’s Quinoa Jambalaya). The game uses its own patterns as The Stealthy Painter marks the backs of various high cards with a real brush, but it also leaves the door open to deck memorization and other advanced concepts with strategies that exploit stolen cards and Duplicates.

Practice, practice and practice

Since they aren’t perfect 99.9% of the time, all new techniques can be practiced as often as possible before being performed at a table or in a stage. There are 28 strategies in total, with some card tricks being new variations of others, and it can be tedious to keep an eye out for terminology like underdrags, riffle shuffles, reverse cuts, and injogs – one card which is moved during an overhand shuffle to protrude from the inside end of a bridge. Scenario practice can help with memorization habits – especially since the scenes only use one turn per turn – and they can also help with Nerial’s unique controller gesture timing and collection pacing. , shuffling and shuffling of a deck of cards.

The pause button is your friend

Similar to other strategy titles and deck builders, Card Shark can throw the whole kitchen sink at you in the blink of an eye and immediately follow it up with a never-ending charade of anxiety. So if you feel immense pressure, take a break! Cheating isn’t exactly easy, and taking a moment to pause the game during a complex technique can help you review new signals, card values, and recognition skills, and even recreate specific control patterns that are unique. to a scene.

Always read the play

Troshinsky’s rewrite of France’s Enlightenment is a gamer’s paradise full of characters who live and die by two things: wealth and secrets. They – alongside the famous Earl himself – are willing to do whatever it takes to gain knowledge on either, so always read the room and be prepared for an unexpected turn of events. Tables can attract unwanted guests (and modifiers) and an ordinary card game can turn into a cliffside duel with Theodore von Neuhoff, King of Corsica, or a romantic dinner for two with an undead host. who calls herself The Lady Of Bones.