Cozy Stickerville
- Board's Eye View
- May 21
- 3 min read
Among the nominations for this year's Spiel des Jahres award, Cozy Stickerville is a light, fully cooperative legacy game for 1-6 players that's designed by Corey Konieczka and published by Unexpected Games and Rebel Studio. It's not so much a story-driven game as a gamified story where the decisions players make result in stickers getting added to the board and so help to shape the village that you are building over the course of play.
Each game represents a year of gameplay time, with each of the months represented by that year's 12 randomly ordered event cards, and the full legacy campaign runs for 10 'years' (games). Obviously tho' the decisions you take in each game year and the stickers that get placed out on the game board have an effect on play in subsequent years.
Without giving away any Spoilers, you make some initial 50/50 decisions (choosing alternatives from pairs of stickers) and throughout the game you're mostly asked to make choices between two or three options. If you're playing with at least two players, it's definitely preferable to have another player read out the card or storybook options so the player making the choice can't peek at the consequences of their decision.
There are resource tokens to collect, representing food, wood and gold. You'll need to spend the resources to meet the requirements on cards; for example, you'll need specific quantities of wood to erect each new building. Each resource is finite but in our plays at Board's Eye View we haven't found resources overly tight; you collect resources at the start of each game year according to the clear icons on the various stickers on the board, and if you are running short there are actions you can take; for example, to fish for food.
The range of possible actions available to players increases steadily as you play and as more cards come out, and many of the stickers also offer actions that refer players to a passage in the accompanying storybook. It's a branching game tho' because decisions effectively push players in one direction at the expense of the paths not taken...
The clue is in the title but Cozy Stickerville is a comfortable, cozy game. Unlike most other legacy games, you're developing a village not warding off a punishing existential threat. This isn't a game you can 'lose' but the decisions you collectively take over your 10 games determines the village you end up with. Where you place stickers on the map is generally more aesthetic than critical to gameplay, tho' if you're playing Cozy Stickerville as a family game you'll find children especially enjoy the plethora of stickers, including stickers that are placed out as overlays adding to or modifying stickers already on the board.
Since a game year is just 12 turns, you can expect to play each of the game years in a filler-length 25-30 minutes regardless of player count. It's playable solitaire but markedly better with two players so you can read out each other's options. You'd probably only want to play with more than three if you're playing as a family game with children. You probably won't want to play all 10 years in a single sitting but you're likely to find players want to get in two or maybe three 'years' in an evening. And unlike the majority of other legacy games, Cozy Stickerville isn't 'one and done': the board is double-sided so when you finish your 10-game campaign you can flip the board for a fresh game, and there are enough stickers to facilitate a full seccond campaign. That means you can invite others to play or, better still, you can play the game again and see how your different choices play out.
