I’ve been burned by card games before, you know. Not like lost my shirt, but lost my heart. There was this one time, tried to impress a girl in college with my ‘poker face’. She saw right through me. Took my last bag of chips, not even metaphorically. This game brought that all back, the cheeky bastard. The faces here, the real ones, not polygons. Something about the one girl’s smirk. The blonde. She has this look, like she already knows your hand and is just waiting to see how you’ll embarrass yourself. I keep picking bad cards just to see her reaction. It’s pathetic.

And the mechanic, the distraction thing. Your opponents just start making out mid-hand. Tongues, hands under bras, the whole messy business. It’s the game’s big idea. While they’re busy, you see their discards. Swapped the wrong queen once because I was staring at the brunette’s shoulder moving a certain way. Cost me the round. Wished they’d let me lose my own way, not because the game is a horny little trickster.

And that clinking sound when the chips drop. I don’t know why my brain latched onto that sound. It’s just a little plastic click. But it’s wrong. A real chip has a certain heft. That sound lives in my head now, this tiny, tinny ghost of my failures. The strip element is there, of course. One layer lost, then another. The brunette’s bra is this complicated black thing, and it never fully comes off the way you think it will, always a strap hanging on. A promise. I keep going back. Not because it’s a great card game. The AI is dumb as a sack of rocks. It’s the space between the cards, that’s where the real game is.