Partway through my conversation with Nerial artist Nicolai Troshinsky about Card Shark, the studio’s upcoming game, a card appears in his hand. It’s a casual gesture, made as he speaks to me about art techniques. A moment later, it vanishes.
Troshinsky is, I later find out, just idly messing with a card on his desk. But the combination of webcam and earlier discussion of card magic makes it seem, for a moment, like I am being shown a clever trick and just don’t realize it yet. After all, Card Shark is a game about tricks of exactly that flavor, and Troshinsky’s card enthusiasm is at the heart of its concept.
Nerial is the studio behind Reigns and its various spin-offs: Her Majesty, Game of Thrones, and The Council. All the Reigns games can be loosely classified as card games largely because the decisions a player makes are determined by card draws and decisions made with them. But they’re not really card games per se, not in the way Poker or Go Fish or Hearthstone or Magic are.
Card Shark, then, follows in the footsteps of its predecessor only in the sense that it’s a card game that isn’t a card game, as design director Francois Alliot explains to me in the same interview. Specifically, it’s a narrative game where the main character travels across 18th-century France and cheats at cards. It’s not about playing games, but about taking advantage of cheating techniques to win. For instance, you might need to arrange a deck to keep track of a card to give to your accomplice, or signal information to your colleague about card values or what cards other players have. Actually being good at cards is optional.
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The cheating techniques come courtesy of Troshinsky, who tells me he’s always loved Stanley Kubrick films, especially Barry Lyndon. Then, five years ago, he started learning card magic as a hobby… a practice which quickly turned into learning how to cheat at cards, too, because the techniques overlap. It was then that he remembered his love of Barry Lyndon, specifically one memorable scene where Barry cheats at cards.
“I thought, what if you had a game that’s just [that scene] from Barry Lyndon over and over?”
He continues: “I was very fresh from magic, and I knew the process: you learn some techniques, you practice them, you learn a trick that puts them together in a sequence, you practice that sequence, you get good at it, and then you execute under pressure in front of your friends. And you have only one chance, because if you screw it up, you cannot repeat it, because then it’s not a magic trick. When you get it right, it’s really satisfying, and you have that loop. And I saw that could actually be a game loop.”
Now, Card Shark isn’t a step-by-step tutorial on how to cheat at cards in real life — it’s a fantasy, not a sim. Some of the in-game tricks are portrayed as easier to perform in-game than they are in reality; others are more impactful in Card Shark than they actually would be. Some are taken from influential books on card cheating from the period, and may be outdated now. But all of them are based on authentic cheats.
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The card cheating puzzles of Card Shark are woven together by a singular narrative, rather different from Reigns’ choice-based direction. In our video interview, Alliot spoke with me directly beneath a long strip of paper plot maps, with lines representing characters’ locations over the game’s timeline. It’s a necessary tool, he says, to help him keep track of who is where at which point in the plot, which involves traveling from place to place with your cheating partners and cheating your way out of situations,with stakes ranging from simple money gambles to trying to avoid getting shot.
And it’s all brought to life via hand-drawn art from Troshinsky created using a technique called monoprinting, which effectively stamps freeform patterns into the art. The scenes are inspired by baroque and rococo paintings and are intended to have the look of period oil paintings, but are treated digitally to keep them from becoming too static.
Card Shark is Nerial’s first deviation from the Reigns formula, and though we haven’t seen much in the way of gameplay yet, it stands poised to solidify Nerial’s overall vibe beyond the Reigns games. Like Reigns, it has all the style, feel, and time-appropriate politics of a period drama. It’s interested in narrative if not decision-making (Alliot confirmed it’s a single, linear path). And of course, it’s a not-a-card-game-card-game, just like its older cousins. But preliminary looks at Card Shark hint at a deeper story and a more sophisticated feel than Reigns’ pleasantly casual play, one we’re eager to see more of.
Fortunately, more info about Card Shark is on the way via a stream on the Unity Twitch channel on July 5 at noon ET, and the game’s currently planned for release this year on Switch and PC via Steam.
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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
