![]() ![]() When the Colonel almost catches you mid-swindle – in the presence of a judge, no less – you use a card flicking technique to send a suspicious ace card or two under the seat of the Colonel, painting him as the real cheater at the table. Some tricks are about cheating an honest man, whereas some are about cheating a cheat.’Īlliot went on to talk about a character you meet early in Card Shark, the arrogant, hot-heated Colonel Gabriel of the French Army. ‘I’m not a classic writer, I needed to have an idea of the gameplay, so I started to match the characters to the different tricks. Like, we know about them, but we don’t really know what they did, so I started to bring them together and imagine.’ Aside from Troshinsky’s use of monoprinting to create the environments of Card Shark, the digital lighting overlaid throughout the game serves to heighten and breathe life into the game’s spaces.īut who would populate this world? ‘Basically,’ explains Alliot, ‘Nicolai was asking me: “who could be the characters, what would be the events,” this kind of thing, so I started making a list of characters that are interesting in history, but not really well covered. The candlelight of an intimate, stately dinner the piercing early dawn light upon a prison cell. The cinematography of Barry Lyndon, and the way Kubrick harnessed natural light (through the use of camera lenses initially intended for NASA) throughout the shooting of that film is a visual language Card Shark is positively drenched in. Lighting the wayĪlliot, for his part, was very interested in the French Revolution at the time, the historical setting which united with another of Troshinsky’s obsessions, Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon. He really likes to go deep into a subject, so he went deep into card tricks and magic, and started to learn a lot of things around that.’ Troshinksy’s obsession with, not just the mechanics of card tricks, but the performance of them is clear he appears in promotional videos for the game, replete in a white wig and finery ripped straight from the grounds of Versailles. ‘The first conversations about the game were between Nicolai and Arnaud,’ says Francois. During a 2019 visit to London, Troshinsky first seeded the ideas of what would become Card Shark, while Alliot and the Nerial team were in the middle of designing Reigns: The Council, a physical board-game entry in the Reigns franchise for which Troshinsky was a tester. It’s entirely possible, though, that Card Shark wouldn’t exist were it not for one person: Nicolai Troshinsky – credited as the ‘card cheat’ behind the game, along with his other roles as artist and animator. When startlingly impressive resumes from game development graduates started landing at Francois’ and Nerial’s doorstep Francois, his wife (and Nerial CEO) Tamara Alliot, and long-time partner Arnaud De Bock knew the time had come for their studio to grow beyond their previous series, Reigns. ‘I like to do things myself, I like to program, I like to write, I like to design.’ ‘It sort of happened a bit despite ourselves,’ Francois Alliot, writer and game designer for Card Shark says from his UK office. ![]() ![]() Read: Card Shark Review – a very neat trick The real Card Shark Card Shark – the new adventure and card cheating simulator from UK developer Nerial, released in June 2022 – is all about beating them at their own game. ‘But…you are cheating!’ he exclaims with glee, thrilled to meet two others on the philosophical road heading out of the ethical trappings of 18th century France, a country ruled by the deluded and the disaffected a political class so removed from reality, so easily bemused, that the idea they may be deceived or tricked by some no-name cardist doesn’t even register into their world.Īs d’Alembert puts it ‘the nobility is full of scammers and cheats, but they are mostly inept amateurs.’ In France, the truth of the matter is that, past a certain socio-political threshold, all of these people are charlatans in one sense or another, grown contented and slow on the presupposition of their power and influence. It’s the cards that tipped d’Alembert off in fact the way this game between three gentlemen has unfolded is a mathematical impossibility, and as a historically notable mathematical genius, d’Alembert knows a thing or two about impossible numbers. Tickled pink he is, by the two men across from him – one young, one old – of no class, no stature bending and playing with morals and virtue as easily as one can shuffle a deck of cards. Under the chandelier candlelight of the Toulouse Parliament Cafe, Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert beams knowingly through the din. ![]()
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