Verdict
Cozy Stickerville isn’t going to win any awards for narrative nuance, but it is a charming, chill way to spend an hour. Build a town entirely out of stickers, build bonds with quirky villagers, and enjoy watching your world expand. It’s simple, joyful, and ideal for family game nights.
- Relaxing, approachable gameplay
- Lovely components
- Joyful and whimsical
- Can be played more than once
- Weak writing
- Choices aren’t as impactful as it might seem
Once again, board gaming’s most esteemed award was filled with bangers. I offer my hearty congratulations to this year’s Spiel des Jahres winners: Rebirth, JinxO, and Mooki Island. To the other nominees, I say this: your board game is no less worthy. This year, several of them stole my heart – particularly Cozy Stickerville.
Corey Konieczka is known for making rich, thematic, strategic, and often brutal board games. Many of them – from Twilight Imperium to Eldritch Horror – are on my personal list of the best board games ever made. What Konieczka is less famous for is making cozy board games.
But here we are, reviewing a game I bought myself that quite literally has ‘cozy’ in the title. Cozy Stickerville is an easy-going legacy board game where you build a charming rural town from the ground up. Every tree, road, and home you add is a fresh sticker for your board.
You occasionally need to peel these stickers off again, but for the most part, they stay put permanently. By the game’s end, you’ll have a custom tapestry of a twee village that’s entirely your own. Like all legacy games, your playtime is finite, but Cozy Stickerville at least gives you a double-sided board – so two chances to play its campaign.
Said campaign is spread across 10 years. Each year comes with an event deck of 12 cards. On your turn, you’ll draw one of these cards, resolve its text, and perform one action of your choice. These actions can be found on cards that are kept in play after drawing, as well as on your town stickers.
Actions are simple and soothing. Spend the afternoon fishing, explore an abandoned mine, or chit chat with a neighbor. Your action usually involves reading an entry in the storybook, and your reward is resource tokens – or more stickers.
Cozy Stickerville only has a few resources for you to juggle. Food, wood, money, and ore tokens are mainly spent constructing new buildings, though they occasionally fuel other one-off benefits like an extra action on your turn.
Happiness is also a resource, in its own way. The overall happiness of your town is represented by heart stickers that climb the right side of the board. You don’t spend happiness the way you would food or cash, but you might aim to create a community that’s as pleased as possible.
Here lies the root of what makes Cozy Stickerville unique. There’s no win or lose conditions. You’re given a few goals you might want to pursue, such as a high happiness score, or a certain number or residents, roads, flowers, or animals. None of them are compulsory, and you won’t be punished for ignoring them.
The path you choose is your own. Start a family, or start a million-dollar enterprise. Become a master baker, or become the President. Build a city full of grand monuments – or one where there’s giant lollipops on every corner.
There’s so much whimsy in this little box. The storybook’s writing is thin and often predictable, and it irks me that there’s basically no negative consequences to anything you do, but Cozy Stickerville is all about the feel-good vibe – for better and worse.
On that front, though, it nails its concept. There’s a childlike joy in discovering and placing stickers, and the adorable art only enhances this feeling. This is the most Stardew Valley a board game has ever felt, and that includes the official Stardew Valley board game.
A single year of play takes 30 minutes to an hour. Setup is minimal, and you barely need to teach the rules. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey.
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Source: Wargamer
