My only problem with Cursed Court is the theme but, sadly, that enough

 During a learning game of Cursed Court, one player said "Oh, so its like Texas Hold 'Em?" As soon as I heard that, I felt like that was actually the best one sentence description of the game.

The game consists of a board with a grid of nine characters who look like they spent a lot of money at a Renaissance fair, a deck of cards with three of each character and betting chips in player colors.

At the start of each hand, cards are dealt out face down between each player and one card is dealt face up. You can look at the two cards next to you. There are four rounds of bidding, with an additional face up card being dealt before each round.

The short version is that you are bidding on what cards you think are actually dealt out since there will be plenty of cards that remain in the deck even by the end of the round. You can outbid other players but you have a limited number of chips. Otherwise there wouldn't be a game.

There is more to the game than that but that's the basic idea. So, it also has an element of Liar's Dice as well as Texas Hold 'Em or has their shared elements.

Mechanically, I feel like Cursed Court holds together. Texas Hold 'Em has to count as one of the most popular games in the world, even if it has a different audience than other board games. Liar's Dice, in one form or another, has been around for centuries. Cursed Court has good bones.

However, I found that I wasn't very engaged by the game. When I read a comment on BGG that the game would make more sense as a game about a casino than a fantasy court, that really clicked for me. The theme and the mechanics do not mesh for me.

I don't mind a pasted-on theme and I love me a totally abstract game. The theme and the mechanics have to downright clash for me to have a problem and, quite frankly, that doesn't happen very often. However, in Cursed Court, the theme distracts me from the mechanics. If someone told me the developers fell in love with the art and just couldn't let it go, I wouldn't be surprised.

Cursed Court has a very good mechanical design, tapping into bluffing and deduction mechanics. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be interested until it gets a better theme.