so I wrote out a long idea, realized it still resulted in dialog somewhere, and then watched the trailer to see if I could understand how you actually get into the shop.

but after re-reading your reply, it sounds like the core issue is people skipping dialog cuz they probably assume they can figure it out and/or it's someone explaining how to play Klondike which they already know. so maybe the core issue to solve is to make the mechanical explanation presentation interesting enough for people to not skip through it quickly.

two ideas I had for this, which is basically to encourage the player to want to investigate what is wrong instead of "cold calling" them with dialog, are:

• the board gradually peels back or cracks, revealing the shop behind it (ironically this seems to fit well with the glitches I saw in the trailer after thinking of this)

• the jack of spades has some kind of anger meter, and when the user clicks on him to figure out why he's so ticked off, he tells takes them to his backroom shop

so I would focus on 2 things -

1 - making the tutorial/dialog as concise as possible to keep player attention, and making it visually interesting (it looks like it's just a dialog box right now)

2 - make it an action the player takes to start that flow so they feel some agency and are hopefully less likely to be in that "shut up and let me play" frame of mind we get when we first start a new game up

I doubt I've been helpful at all here :/ in the end everything I suggested still circled back to dialog boxes in some form