Wario Ware meets Barry Lyndon in a card game like no other

Developer Nerial Publisher Devolver Digital Format PC, Switch Origin Russia, UK Release 2021

As kids we are told that cheats never prosper –a proverb that life seems to be doing its best to disprove. So why not get in on the grift? Nerial’s latest is another card game, but it isn’t your average deckbuilder, though in a sense it shares something in common with this now-ubiquitous genre. You’ll need to master a variety of techniques to cheat your way up to the upper echelons of 18th-century French society, even putting your life on the line in the highest-stakes games. But on a fundamental level, it’s all about ensuring you’ve got the strongest hand.

The idea behind Card Shark began to form when artist and former filmmaker Nicolai Troshinsky developed a fascination with card magic. But it only became tangible after he watched Stanley Kubrick’s period drama Barry Lyndon. “There’s this very memorable scene where the main character cheats with cards,” he says. “And that quickly connected to what I was learning at the time about card manipulation.” He started researching the mechanics of card cheating in the hope of creating something that matched the sense of mischief of the scene in Kubrick’s film: a playful kind of swindle.