Zhenya’s Wonder Tales is a set of 6 card games retelling dark, Slavic-inspired fairy stories in 1-2 hours.
Enter a dark world of Slavic- and Baltic-inspired fairy stories. Your perfectly innocent and kind-hearted host, Zhenya, will guide you. Fall in love with a bear. Bow before the King of the Snakes. Marry a shape-changing fairy—or fight one to the death. Search for your stolen skin, high above Devil’s Bridge. Attend the funeral of Night and console their children, Dawn and Dusk.
Each wonder tale begins as a set of 22 cards that serve as illumination, inspiration, and grim predestination. As you play, you and your friends will be asked to make choices that will shape the direction of the tale toward happiness—or ruin. A single tale takes about an hour to reach its often surprising, but always satisfying, conclusion.
Old Zhenya is waiting for you! Won’t you come in, have a hot glass of fireweed tea, and tell a wonder tale together?
What’s in the Box?
Zhenya’s Wonder Tales comes with a deck of 135 full-color playing cards in a lovely, compact, magnetic-closure box (similar to the one we used for Desperation).
The deck includes six replayable one-shot games of 22 cards each, with glorious, evocative illustrations by award-winning artist Momatoes, and includes the cards you need to tell a story weirder than anything the Brothers Grimm ever cooked up, in about an hour.
Together with a clear set of instructions, including advice for solo and large group play, Zhenya’s Wonder Tales packs a lot of fun into the box.
In addition, we'll be including a custom cloth map of Zorovna in each box, illustrated by Sovanny Vorn and featuring all the locations from the Wonder Tales!
In Zhenya’s Wonder Tales, each player portrays a character in the chosen tale, who probably has an interesting secret and definitely has three story beats—moves—that need to be triggered. Moves are big, classic events that everyone will be playing toward, like Klára’s “Fall in love with Ondřej” in The Bird Rivals. We know love will take flight, but how? And when? It will be different every time you play, but it’s a fairy story, and certain things just happen in fairy stories—like falling in love, maybe with the wrong person.
Together, the move cards form a narrative framework you and your friends can explore together. There are sixteen move cards on the table, and by the time most or all of them have been triggered, your wonder tale will definitely be nearing its satisfying (and probably horrifying) conclusion. Since these cards are public, you will always know where to focus your collective attention and gameplay—and where in the rhythm of the tale you are at the moment.
"Jason's bottled lightning yet again. Zhenya's Wonder Tales is a sleek, lush, and immensely rewarding game. Meticulously researched to capture the dark, sprawling spirit of Eastern European folklore yet written and designed with calculated elegance, all you need is a few friends, a spare hour, and one deck of cards that contains everything you need to play: characters, relationship tensions, conflicting desires, and the various paths to their shared fate. Bully Pulpit doesn't miss!" – Jeeyon Shim, game designer
"Zhenya's is a blast to play and I was impressed at how well it supports a fun and compelling story in under an hour. The card based approach is beginner friendly and the specificity of the content generates strong narratives while still being highly replayable. It's an incredibly impressive game and I look forward to playing all of the stories once when it's released." – Randy Lubin, game designer
"Zhenya's is SO good, and such an interesting development of how to use PBTA style moves. So simple, so expandable, so stealable. You should get on this to play it, but also get on it if you're interested in cool new design tech." – Sam Dunnewold, host of the Dice Exploder Podcast
"A grim fairy tale distilled to the essence. Cool stuff starts happening instantly and doesn't let up. Wonderful!" – Michael Sands, Generic Games, designer of Monster of the Week
