Playing Zhenya’s Wonder Tales with more or less than four is not only possible, in some cases it is a significant improvement. 

The game is designed around a character quartet, which makes playing with four participants an easy and fun choice. But if you don’t have four, what does that do to the game? It turns out it does some really fun and interesting things! The following options will generally work with different group sizes, although some are obviously beneficial at certain scales. 

Player or players take a more writer’s room approach and work together to craft the tale in a manner similar to solo play. The game becomes more freeform and cards are chosen by consensus. While this will work for any size group (Including 5+), it shines for solo play. 

Zhenya’s Wonder Tales provides a concrete, bounded experience that will feel familiar to anyone who already enjoys solo roleplaying. It’s easy to play all four roles, perhaps from Zhenya’s point of view. Let the characters act in turn and see where they take you once they assert themselves a little. 

In this mode, Zhenya’s makes a terrific journaling game as well—either from the elevated perch of a not-so-friendly observer, or from four unique perspectives, or in a more traditional first person perspective. The game plays identically, and all you have to do is look at the available cards and decide what, logically, must come next. 

Each player assumes the role of one or more characters. With two players, each takes two. With four, each takes one (This, obviously, is the game’s default mode). 

Whenever you play more than one character you need to hold them lightly, because it is likely you will end up in scenes that feature both of your people. In these cases, don’t have a conversation with yourself—hand off one or the other to your co-player. This mode is ideal for four players, or for two. It won’t work with an odd number unless two people elect to co-play a single character. 

Each player takes a single character as in a four-player game, and the remaining characters are shared, community property. This represents a fun middle ground between the preceding two options, giving you a chance to really dig into a single character’s portrayal while working with your friend—or friends—to decide what happens to the others.

If you play this way, it’s a great idea to decide which character or characters are the most interesting to the group and make them community property. This mode works really well for three players. 

Any of these modes of play will also work with helpers. A helper is a player without a specific character who is available for other tasks. Helpers might play minor characters, or provide vivid descriptions of locations, or manipulate the action a little by whispering in ears or editing scenes. Perhaps your helper reads and interprets cards. They might be in charge of background audio. Whatever will make the game more fun and interesting, task the helper with it. 

If you have five or more participants, a helper makes a lot of sense, but there’s nothing stopping someone from taking on the role with a smaller group as well. 

It would have been easy to codify all of this in the rules, but we hope that you’ll be creative and experiment instead. What happens when you run a fully collaborative tale with four players? What does a partially collaborative tale look like with only one player taking a specific role (This is, by the way, a classic storybook set-up)? Zhenya won’t snitch on you, so give it a try, and let us know how it goes!