Cozy Stickerville

• Designer: Corey Konieczka
• Publisher: Unexpected Games
• Players: 1-6
• Age: 8+
• Time: 30 min/year (10 years to complete campaign)
• Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4rllnfe
• Played with review copy provided by publisher

Explore the land, uncover mysteries, and follow your residents’ personal stories. Build your Village with over 800 stickers featuring houses, farms, shops, animals, and so much more! As your village grows, so do your options: go fishing, explore the mine, find true love, and more!

Create your legacy as your choices unlock new options and can have lasting repercussions in future games. The buildings you choose have unique effects, and each decision creates new possibilities in future years. Explore and Discover as you help residents pursue personal stories, go fishing, explore the mine, and uncover hidden mysteries. A Game For Everyone!

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In Cozy Stickerville, you and your friends will create a  village together. There is no way to lose the game, but your decisions will cause permanent changes that can have both positive and negative effects on your village. You will seek to accomplish milestones and gain happiness while building the village of your dreams.

Each time you play, you’ll need to get out the Sticker book and the Card Catalog.  The storybook will give you the setup for the particular year that you are playing.  If you are just starting, there are also some starting stickers which are placed on your board to start.   Each year has an event deck of 12 cards. 

To play the game, players will take turns – each consisting of two steps: the morning phase where you draw an event card and then the afternoon phase where you do an action.  As you play, you may gain resources – these are all kept in a common pool, and they can be used by any player.  

In general, the active player makes all the decisions on their turn, but you can surely discuss the options with your fellow players if you like.

In the Morning, you draw the top card of the event deck, read it aloud and see what happens.  You might be asked to make a choice – once you do this, you can flip the card over to read what happens.  In our group, we found it best to have a different player read out the card while the active player listened and then gave their answer.  In this way, it was harder to inadvertently read the results on the card. If the event card remains in play, you can tuck it under the map so that you only see the action part.  Any player can do this action on the Afternoon portion of their turn.

In the Afternoon, a player can do one action – these are all easily seen by the hourglass icon.  These can be seen on different components of the game (cards, stickers, etc).  The icon to the right of the hourglass will tell you what to do – draw a card, read a passage from the story book, or more complex choices generally found on cards.

As you play, you can achieve milestones – and this will let you add stickers to your map.  These milestones could unlock further actions and events.  You can also gain Happiness – little Heart stickers which can affect the storyline.

Continue playing turns until the deck is exhausted.  Then, resolve any End of Year effects on the cards from the year.  You can now keep on playing another year or pack up all the resources and active cards into the save box so you can quickly set up for the next session.

At the end of the tenth year, you’ll get to read one of five different endings.  There really isn’t a way to win or lose the game, you just get to see how your Cozy Stickerville ended up.

My thoughts on the game

OK, so I’ll start by saying that I haven’t even finished the first year yet – but I don’t need to do that to write this review.  TL;DR.  I love it.  But it’s not a game.

What?  Well, the rules even state it on the front page “There is no way to lose the game”.  Which, by my definition of a game, means it’s not a game.  It’s an activity.  But, man, what an engaging activity it is!  We have played through six or seven years in the game, and my group is very much into the story, wanting to finish it out.  That’s a rare occurrence for games like this in my group.

The game starts out with players choosing a bunch of starting stickers, taking one of each pair.  This sets the original storylines in motion – and leaves the start of unchosen ones for the second game.  As you play, your choices will determine future storylines, and it’s up to you to decide how you will develop them.  

You might bring a new family to your stickerville, and then spend eight actions visiting them to get to the end of their story arc.  Or, you could simply ignore them all game and do other things – the choice is up to you!  

You do get a bit of basic income each year – so you can build new things (and start new storylines), but at some point in the year, you might have to spend a few turns getting more resources, and that will limit how much of the overall story you’ll see.  Decisions are often simple, but they can have long-term consequences – as later events might change based on whether or not you’ve done a particular thing in the past.

We’ve played the game in a 5p group, and it’s worked fine.  Admittedly, each of us only gets to be the active player 2.4 times each year – but the whole story has kept us interested.  We certainly do our best to lobby the active player on their choices!  We have come up with a nice system where we rotate around the event deck, the sticker book and the story book – so that players have things to do when they’re not the active player.   This system is also good because the active player never reads anything, which makes it harder for them to accidentally see any of the possible effects of their choices (no cheating in stickerville!)

Interestingly, our group has often split off into each chasing their own story.  One of us might be obsessed with getting married, and every time it’s his turn, choices are made to further that story.  Someone else really wants to plant flowers, so guess what usually happens on that turn?!  Though there might not be a way to lose this game (and thus, not really a way to win it either) – all five of us are quite invested in the outcome of our stickerville, and like I said, we’re all ready to keep playing as soon as we’re all together.  

Each year is taking 30-40 minutes, so this will end up being about 6 hours to go through the first year – and you get enough stuff to play through twice; so say 12 hours of gaming fun in the box.  You can’t play it again after that; but in this age, that’s still a pretty good amount of time to spend with a game.   We’re having an Unexpected blast with this activity, and I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to place stickers on the board and grow my little town.

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it! Dale Y
• I like it. John P
• Neutral.
• Not for me…

Amazon affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4rllnfe