Our old friends Gretchen and Brad came up to Seattle to visit for the weekend, and we found time to try the new Bully Pulpit/Jason Morningstar game, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales. It’s been forever since we gamed together; they were pillars of my gaming experience back during my first run through the Bay Area. Champions, Feng Shui, Shadowrun — the good old trad gaming days. It was awfully nice to sit down and tell stories with them again.
And Zhenya’s is well worth writing up. It’s one of Morningstar’s card-based RPGs, which I have been liking a lot. (Yeah, I’ll get back to The Last Tour when my life quiets down a bit.) Once again, he’s leaning into the pre-written story setup. Zhenya’s includes six stories, each one with four player characters and a hornet’s nest of clashing motivations and desires. They’re all dark fairy tales. The replay value seems high but the story beats are going to be similar for any play through of a given story.
Note: mild spoilers for the Snake King ahead!
The clever trick here is that the story beats are tied to move cards, which mostly generate explicit choices. For example, one move card for the Snake King story is titled “When You Tip Toe Around the Palace at Night.” When a player chooses to use that move, they flip the card over and find out that they’re caught in the act, but only after they learn something. They also choose one or more of the listed options, like “You discover something delightful” or “You discover something heartbreaking.” Each move is a one-off; you can tip toe around the palace more than once but the key story beat of being discovered only happens the first time. That serves as a pacing mechanism for the session as a whole.
We debated a bit about whether you were meant to read the cards in advance of using the moves or not, and decided that the answer was “not.” I think that’s correct. The setup is simple enough so that a lot of the joy of the game is discovering the painful dilemmas as they arrive. It was much cooler finding out why the merchant Vadim cared about the servant Daryna in play. I’d tune that to my play group, of course — maybe you like knowing what’s coming so you can steer into the fun.
So I played the smug, privileged Snake King, and S. played his human wife Jasna. Gretchen played Vadim and Brad played Daryna. Vadim was visiting our little snake kingdom to petition for the right to build a road through our forest.
Over the course of one eventful night we discovered the shameful bargains that brought Daryna to the Snake King’s service and the honest yearnings that divided the Snake King from beloved Jasna. The choices inherent in the moves were fairly brutal; it’s not intended to be a happy ending game and while we came to a peaceful conclusion, I’m not entirely sure everyone got what they wanted. Nor did it feel totally stable.
Without getting much further into spoilers, I advise players to hold their plans very loosely. For example, I had a move for giving Daryna a birthday present. (What a nice, compassionate monarch I was!) I saw a chance to use it during one scene by passive-aggressively giving Daryna his freedom, but when I flipped the card over and actually read it, the choices didn’t fit my plans at all. This worked out just fine — I even still got to be a bit passive-aggressive — but this is no game for players who prefer more control.
All in all, very satisfying and I hope to break it out again sometime. As promised, it fits in 1-2 hours of play. Our session ran around 2 hours, largely because the rulebook is somewhat terse and we spent a little while getting into the swing of scene framing. If we played again with the same group, we’d have a better handle on both the mechanics and we’d know where to lean into the tragic tone immediately. And I’d even play the same story again; it’s fun thinking about how I’d make choices if I was playing Jasna, for example.