Without embellishment, I can honestly say that playing all the way through Cozy Stickerville has been one of my favorite gaming experiences of all time. It’s easily cooperative, it’s very engaging, it’s truly cozy as you and your friends work together to build a town.

I became aware of Cozy Stickerville from many sources. It turns out the designer of Cozy Stickerville (Cory Koniecza) designed my favorite games of 2023: The Initiative! See review here. So, I was super excited for this! I ended up ordering Cozy Stickerville directly from the website in early 2026 to get it as soon as I could. My friends were excited to play it; I presented the game as “Stardew Valley in a board game!” and my friends, especially Teresa (who is a big Stardew Valley fan) were excited.

 

The nature of this game meant we had to play it OUTSIDE our normal circles. What do I mean by this? Stardrew Valley … sorry, I mean Cozy Stickerville, is a legacy game lasting ten episodes. A legacy game mean means a couple of things: 1) we’ll be changing the state of game as we play and 2) The game spans multiple sessions, so we’ll have to make a committed effort to get the same group together to play again and again! My playgroups are fairly fluid; people come and go, work gets in the way, and it’s sometimes hard to always get the same group together. So, to play Cozy Stickerville, me and Sara and Teresa had to commit to playing all ten games together, even outside our normal gaming rotations.

Over the course of two months, we played “about” every two weeks, and playing two or three of the episodes of the ten episode arc.

Stickers!

If you aren’t quite sure what a legacy game is, it’s usually tearing up cards and/or adding stickers to things. In the case of Cozy Stickerville, they have completely embraced the sticker part of the game! The game comes with a huge book full of stickers; no joke, it’s about 12 page full of stickers! As you play new games, you add stickers to board and stickers to story points and stickers stickers stickers!

Cozy Stickerville is a game all about building your town. The stickers you put in the board help define the character of the town! The structures you build, the people you choose, the families, the businesses! You put people stickers, flower stickers, bird stickers, animal stickers … on your board! And this is what Cozy Stickerville is! It’s all about making decisions, as a group, about the town you want to build! The mechanism it uses to build the town is stickers.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty easy; there are twelve events per episode, and each player takes an event card (which usually forces a decision), and then gets to do “something” in town.

Sometimes the “something” is getting resources (you might need wood to build some business, you might need money to add a new building, you might need food to feed your people), and sometimes the something is adding a sticker!

Each turn is really simple; draw an event, deal with it, then do something. And that’s it! But it’s the conversations that come out of all this are what make this so fun! As a group, we decide what flavor of town we want to build! Each player still has agency on their turn, as they are the final arbiter of what they do on their turn, but we found that we were always talking and discussing!

Each single game (a single episode) only last about 15 to 20 minutes. And that’s it! That’s why we were able to play two to three games (episodes) per session.

To be clear, once we are done playing all ten episodes, the game is done. The game is full of stickers and you have defined your town (but see below).

Cozy

This is definitely a cozy game. It’s not taxing at all to play. It’s simple gameplay; it’s fun and silly to place the stickers. But it’s the overall experience that makes this cozy. Me and my friends are just hanging out, making little decisions about our town, and placing stickers. You might think it sounds “stressful” to build a town … oh, it is so not stressful. You just make little choices and see what happens.

This is probably the coziest game I have ever played.

Conclusion

I wasn’t quite sure where I would land on this, but I think I have to give this a 10/10. I had more fun playing this little silly game than anything I have played in a while. This game became something I looked forward to; it became an event! Teresa would make some crazy food from the Star Wars cookbook, or the Stardrew Valley cookbook, and we would eat and chat! We would reminisce about the last session, as we came up to speed on all the decisions we made!

Cozy Stickerville became an event in every sense of the word; we planned schedules around it, we planned food around it, and we looked forward to each session.

I have to admit to feeling a little sad once our final game was over. It was a fantastic journey and a series of fortunate events made this so fun. 10/10 for me and my friends, and probably my cooperative game of the year.

Appendix (It’s Not QUITE Over!)

It turns out, even after you are done, you can still play the game one more time! You flip the board over and build a new town using the stickers that are still leftover! All the decisions you made in the previous game exclude some of the cards from the game, but you can actually play it again!