Cozy Stickerville by Unexpected Games

What if the most satisfying legacy campaign isn’t about winning at all, but about watching a small town come to life one sticker at a time? We dive into Cozy Stickerville from Unexpected Games and explore why this 10-session, 30-minute-per-year story-builder is winning hearts at family tables and weeknight game nights alike. With designer Corey Konieczka pivoting from space operas to small comforts, the result is a gentle, branching experience where your choices shape a shared map, not your stress levels.

We break down how it plays: draw an event, choose a path, place a sticker, then visit a location with an hourglass icon to unlock a mini story. The milestones you collect echo forward—sometimes as delightful perks, sometimes as red-flag consequences that resurface with a wink—giving real weight to decisions without punishing anyone. There’s no win or loss state here, just a growing scrapbook of moments: adopting a wolf pup, debating a shady election, chasing the fishing milestone, or planting more trees for a nature-first town. Setup is quick, teardown is nothing, and the tuck boxes keep your progress ready for the next cozy session.

We also look at the bigger picture: why cozy board games resonate right now, how this design borrows the best vibes from Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, and what legacy can feel like when permanence enhances memories instead of anxiety. With two boards for replay and dozens of branching routes, Cozy Stickerville is approachable, cooperative, and surprisingly reflective—perfect for parents seeking meaningful play, partners wanting calm connection, and groups that crave story over spreadsheets.

If you’re searching for family board games, cooperative campaign games, or an easy legacy experience you’ll actually finish, this is the one to check out. Enjoy our take, then tell us how you’d shape your town: nature preserve, bustling market, or legendary bakery? Subscribe, share with a friend who loves cozy games, and leave a review to help others find their next favorite game night.

Chapters

• 0:15 Back On Mic, Rough Voices
• 0:57 Introducing Cozy Stickerville
• 1:05 From Epics To Cozy Design
• 2:49 How The Legacy Campaign Works
• 5:31 Turn Structure And Story Choices
• 8:24 Branching Paths And Milestones
• 10:16 Playing With Kids And Ethics
• 12:06 Cooperative Citybuilding Rhythm
• 14:22 Sticker Volume And Objectives
• 16:24 Why Cozy Games Hit Now
• 19:02 Setup Ease And Replay Hopes

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:15

Welcome to the Operation Game Night Podcast. We are back and barely hanging on by a thread. If you are listening to the audio version of this podcast, no, Travis has not been replaced with an 80-year-old smoker. It is Travis, I here in the flesh. I am just losing my voice. And I know this is a bit hard to listen to, but we're going to press through anyways because board games don't stop, and neither do we.

SPEAKER_00: 0:39

Heck yeah. Last week we stopped.

SPEAKER_01: 0:42

I mean, yeah. We were dealing with some stuff. That's okay.

SPEAKER_00: 0:45

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 0:45

Yeah, we're all right, you know. Yeah, I know. We all missed you last week. I've been missing Clay. Clay's been missing Jared. Jared's been missing me. And collectively, OGN has been missing you, the listener, but we're back. We're back. We're talking about the hottest of games. Today we're talking Cozy Stickerville. Clayton, take it away. Tell me about Cozy Stickerville.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05

I would love to tell you about Cozy Stickerville, Travis. This is a hard pivot from our last episode where you and Vic talked about Twilight Imperium. We are now talking about Cozy Stickerville, which rocks up with a 1.28 weight on BGG. It's all in the name right there. This is just a cozy little game where you're putting stickers on a little map. Um, so this came out from Unexpected Games. Corey Konetska's the designer. Uh, I think it's pretty interesting, Corey Konetska. I hope I'm saying that right. Well, I'm just gonna call him Corey from here on out. Uh Corey used to work at Fantasy Flight, and he designed these like mega games like Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars Rebellion. I think he's on maybe Outer Rim. Yep. Like he was designing all these big games, and I don't know what happened. I could have done some more research, but he branched off and started Unexpected Games, and they've put out a handful of games so far. I think the initiative might have been their first one. Uh they definitely voices in my head. They have Mandalorian Adventures. Those are the three I know about up until this one. And I played the initiative and Voices in My Head. Both games were doing some really interesting things. I think that's kind of what he wanted to do was branch off in his own company and like try and do some innovative, innovative mechanisms and try and bring something a little new to the board game design space.

SPEAKER_01: 2:35

Some might say unexpected.

SPEAKER_00: 2:39

Yes, it's right there in the name. I mean, the publisher's name is Unexpected, the game's name is Cozy Stickerville. Truth in advertising. All right. Voices in my head didn't really hit for me, but it was it. I it was worth checking out. I thought it was an interesting concept. It was like a Plinko style game where you were pushing these little bubbles off an edge and trying to land them in this guy's mind and you were trying to control what he was thinking. It was a super interesting concept that that had me hooked when I heard about it. It just wasn't the funnest when I played it. But still, again, kudos to anybody that's like pushing limits out there. But I saw Cozy Stickerville and I was immediately drawn to it. One, because it was unexpected games, and two, because it looked like something that would be great to play with my kids. Um, I really didn't know much about it. I assumed it was a legacy type game. I guess maybe you could call it that, a campaign game. I'm not sure. I guess it's legacy. I mean, you are adding stickers to the board that changes the trajectory of the game forever. So you could say it's legacy. So in the box, there is two sets of like there's a front and a back to the board, which allows you to play this twice. So it's not a one-and-done legacy game. You could play one side of the board, which is all the way through, is 10 games worth. And then on the back side of the board, you could play another 10 games worth, and then you're pretty much done. Uh but the way the game works is super it's super simple. Uh basically it combines like a choose your own adventure story with um, you know, just like building out a city like in in real time. So on your turn, you'll usually get presented with a card. And the the backstory of the game is that your dad like kicked you out of the house and gave you this plot of land and said, You gotta go make it for yourself out there, buddy. I'm sick of you freeloading. So you start with this pretty much empty map and you seed it with your first little house, your starting cottage that was pulled up on the board just a second ago. And then throughout the rest of the game, each year there's a set of cards that have different events in them, and the year lasts as long as that set of cards lasts. So each year has taken about you know 30 to 40 minutes. And pardon, there may be some light spoilers in here. If that really puts you off, then you know, goodbye.

SPEAKER_01: 5:18

Uh just keep the episode rolling, just mute it, and then you try and read our lips and then guess what we're saying, see if it flushes out when you play the game.

SPEAKER_00: 5:25

Yes, exactly. Do that. So light spoilers. Uh so anyway, you're going through the course of a year. Your basic turn looks like drawing a card off the top of the deck. It'll usually have something that happened in the town, right? So somebody showed up, they wanna, they wanna live in your town, they have this skill or that skill, you can turn them away or you can let them live there. And you make your choice, and you flip the card over, and based on what choice you made, it'll say this thing or that thing happens. A lot of times you're adding new stickers to the board. So that's part one of your turn. And then part two of your turn, you're allowed to take an action. And so actions start out pretty contained. Um, there's stickers on the map that have like the action symbol, which looks like a little hourglass. And so if you see any stickers on the map with an hourglass, you can use an action to go visit that spot on the map and read from the storybook about what's going on there. So maybe there was like a mine somewhere and it has a little, you know, hourglass. You could say, All right, for my action, I'm gonna go see what's up with this mine. Then you read a little bit from the story, it'll give you like another branching adventure to choose from, and you follow it. Then the next person takes their turn. They pull a card, they get a they get a chance to make a decision, but and you're collecting resources and you're trying to, you know, complete objectives, but it quickly goes from like, okay, I'm just going out to this same old pile of wood, hunting for wood, and uh collecting wood so I can, you know, build a fence or whatever, and you start gathering more cards that give you things to do, and you get these milestones on the side. So I've gotten really into fishing in the game I'm in. So you can you can like go down all these little rabbit holes. There's like puzzly bits you can go through. Like at the in year two, we uncovered this weird puzzle on a tree, and I've had no idea what to do with it since then. It's just been a card that you know we pull out at the start of every year, all the cards that you keep between the year, you put in a little tuck box and you pull them all out again. Oh, okay. And they and they like it's that it's like saving the game. And I see it every time. I'm like, I wonder what I'm supposed to do with that. But I move on, I keep going fishing or whatever. Yeah. And you know, you build out more things, like we got, you know, libraries or whatever, and just each thing you build out gives you new actions you can take and new paths you can go down. So it branches really quickly, and and there's no winning, there's no losing. It is literally just a cozy, fun game to just open up, read a couple little prompts from a storybook, make some decisions, get excited about, you know, becoming the best baker in town and getting to put a getting to put a gold sticker on your little milestone chart. Um, but yeah, that's like the basics of what you're doing. Each game, again, it's like 30 minutes. There's 10 in the in the whole course of the the legacy thing. I've been playing it with my kids, and we have just been having a blast with this. What are they focusing on in their towns? It's funny. I think this is a this has been one of my favorite games to play with them because you literally get to have decisions or like uh discussions about every decision that you're making within the game. You're like, you know, you know, Mason made some questionable choices that that you know, we're gonna remember some of these things. You know, it's like memorable events that happen. He one of the things, again, light spoiler, pause this or whatever, it's not that big of a deal. But you could run for office in your small town, and you had a chance to like, you know, campaign and put in the effort to run for office. Mason chose to forgo all that and just hit the ballot box. Nice. Well, it it gave him a prompt like, hey, you lost. You can either accept that result, or you can say it was fraudulent. And and so anyway, we ended up with this dictator milestone because of him. Um, so we're we're running our village with an iron fist right now. And then, you know, like you want to let you found this stray wolf pup, what do you want to do with it? Like, just things like that. And you you get to talk to the kids about like, oh, what do you want to do? Like, why do you want to do that? And it's just it's just fun to engage with them and and see where the story takes us.

SPEAKER_01: 10:01

So you guys are all playing on the same like city. Yep. You guys are all characters building out this city as you go along.

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

Yeah, I mean that's pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_01: 10:09

That's cool.

SPEAKER_00: 10:10

Yeah, yeah. So when it's your turn, you get to decide ultimately what happens with that card and that decision, but you all talk about it and like, oh yeah, I think it would be more fun or whatever to build the build the sawmill instead of whatever. Uh so it's cooperative, but on your turn, you get you get to make the final say in what gets put into your city.

SPEAKER_01: 10:35

And how many it says that it comes with over 800 stickers, and that's like on the box, it's on the BGG homepage. Like, how many stickers are you actually putting down on a random session? Like within those stories.

SPEAKER_00: 10:48

Oh my gosh, probably in a uh a session. I mean, it is in the name, it is cozy stickerville. Each each year, you're probably putting down maybe 10 stickers. Okay. So, I mean, some are big, some are small. Like you'll get, you know, a big old building you can place out, and then maybe you know, you get to place a little flower garden somewhere. And then there's like objectives based on, oh, if you get four flower gardens, you can claim whatever. Uh so there's just a lot of different paths you can go down, a lot of different, you know, little dopamine hits you can chase in this game. It just all feels good. There are some things that come out during the the year that have like a red flag on it. And if you don't accomplish that by the end of the year, it gets you like a negative milestone that gets added to your chart. And these things matter because like later on in the game, it'll come up and say, like, if you have the whatever milestone, then do this option. If you don't, do this other option. And so if you have the if you like took a loan out early in the game, you know, somebody might be coming back to collect on that, you know. Yeah, so it's just I I think it's super clever, and I'm finding that this type of game just they are always up there among my best experiences, like a really light legacy game that just changes a little bit. Like when I think of some of my favorite games I've played, um, I'm talking about My City, yeah. Recently, The Hobbit, there and back again, that roll and right. Like those type of games right now, that's just my jam because they're quick, they're like 30 minutes a pop. And then the next game you play, it's just like a little bit of discovery, something new. And this one has like slipped right in there. You can see it's 8.5 rating, it's a solid game. Yeah, I don't have much bad to say about it. I don't know what it would be like playing with adults, but playing with my kids, it's like it's almost the perfect game. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 12:55

Yeah, I'm surprised that we didn't see more of this like post-COVID. Just cozy games that are easy to digest and like a little bit of escapism and constant dopamine hits. Yeah, you know, Animal Crossing became the biggest thing in the world because everyone had a switch and everybody had an infinite time on their hands to just sit around and like tinker with a town with cute animals, right? Like, yeah, stuff like this I thought would have blown up post-COVID, post-2020, even during COVID. Uh I obviously the board game board gaming sphere suffered during COVID because people couldn't get together to do the production. But even post-COVID, I figured that wave would have been like right there, and you didn't really see a whole lot of it. I mean, there are cozy games that came out of it, tons of games that were designed during COVID that are coming out still. Um, but this is like a stripped down version to me of like the Stardew Valley game where you have this sandbox, you go in, you build up your village, you can meet different people. Like that type of stuff is cozy for a reason. And I I just think that we wouldn't we probably will see more after this. I would honestly, yeah, do you think this is like gonna shape the gaming world at all?

SPEAKER_00: 14:09

Or I hope so because I love it. Honestly, it's it it shouldn't be as fun as it is. It's just it just all comes together so nicely. I don't know. It it almost feels like vantage, but where you have pretty much free reign on your turn, like what do I want to do? Yeah, um, and you can pick a thing and see what happens, but it's just so much simpler. And the setup and teardown is a breeze, it's like nothing. You literally open up your tuck box, pull out your things, and then start drawing from the next year's deck of cards and seeing what happens. So I I hope more games like this come out. It really does. I've heard it compared to like Animal Crossing, yeah, and things like that. But you really do just you you build out this town, and then you like you said, there's a person over here that has the little action symbol next to it, and you're like, Oh, you know what, they've been over there for a while. Let me, it's my turn now. Let me just go chat them up and see what they're about, and they'll give you some prompt and you get to make a decision, and it's just all just just nice. It's just nice, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:17

It's a nice game. Have you finished like a complete game or are you halfway through your I'm six out of ten through six ten.

SPEAKER_00: 15:26

Okay. Yep. So we're we're still cruising. Um we've been, I mean, we just got it the other week and we probably played it, you know, four or five times last week. So it's just rising in the family's esteem. Every time we have some time, we're like, oh, let's get another year in. Let's get another year in. That's great. Yeah, it is so much fun.

SPEAKER_01: 15:47

Yeah, man. This is something that I want to like, I can't wait to like introduce Gwen to. This is like something I want to just sit down and live in for a while.

SPEAKER_00: 15:54

It is so I I was shocked at how how much I enjoyed it. Like, I knew it would be fun for the kids, but I've had a lot of fun with it too. Just, you know, I the last whole last year, I was just like, you know what, I'm just gonna get that fishing milestone. I'm gonna hit that fishing pond every turn. And it's just so simple.

SPEAKER_01: 16:14

I uh man, it's like it's kind of like a little RPG where you're just living in a escapism fantasy world where the stakes don't really matter and you're just kind of cruising around, cruising along regardless. Like, yeah, man, there's a there's definitely a space for that now. People are clamoring for escapism and lighthearted fun, and this is a great place to find it.

SPEAKER_00: 16:36

Yeah. Uh my understanding is when you get to the end of the 10th year, like based on the different milestones you collected, and you know, what different buildings you have out, it'll give you a synopsis of like, oh, this is how your village did, you know, like you're you're an industrial village, you're doing you know, so I'll have to see what comes out of it at the end. It's interesting at all three of us making choices on our turn. There's not a lot, there's not, I wouldn't say there's a lot of synergy amongst our village, it's just like a hodgepodge of like different fun ideas we had. Isaac is all about nature, so anytime there's something involving nature, he wants to plant more trees. Nice and Mason's a bit of an industrialist, so when he gets a chance to make some money out there, he's making it. And uh man, it's been a it's been a hoot.

SPEAKER_01: 17:28

That's great, man. That sounds awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 17:31

Yeah, you should definitely play it. I bet you and Rachel would have a good time just sitting down and putting some stickers on a board and making a cool choice.

SPEAKER_01: 17:39

But last thing, I yeah, that's always been my hang up with games like this, or like those quasi-legacy games, is when they have you like quote unquote, like destroy the cards, the book, the board. Like, even my city felt like wrong to me to put those things on your board and have to live with it like forever. Oh, like decision paralysis. Oh, is this the right decision? Do I put it here? Do I put it here? Something like this, I can definitely get into because, like you said, there's two boards in there. So if you screw one up, you got another board sitting there waiting. Yeah, and two, it seems like you play this through maybe once and then pass it along to a friend that would enjoy it, or like, yeah, how how often are you gonna revisit a new city, right?

SPEAKER_00: 18:23

I might go through it again and just make some different choices. Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm having that much fun with it that I I would I would play it again, okay, for sure. And it is every time we unfold the board and you look at it, you're like, wow, look at all we've done because it started blank, and now we just got all these, you know, different buildings and things and nature preserves, just all the stuff that we've built up in our little town. So it's a lot of fun. I'm sold. I'm getting it.

SPEAKER_01: 18:51

I love it. Get it, get it, get it, guys. I'll have to report back once we've played through.

SPEAKER_00: 18:55

Yeah, there's not a lot there for the gamery gamer. I mean, it is okay, making a choice and placing stickers, but it's good.

SPEAKER_01: 19:04

That's all right. It is just the lubricant to bring people together and get a good time had at the table.

SPEAKER_00: 19:09

That's what we're all about here.

SPEAKER_01: 19:10

That's right. All right. Did we do it?

SPEAKER_00: 19:14

We did it.

SPEAKER_01: 19:14

All right. For Operation Game Night, I have been Travis. He has been Clay. This has been Cozy Stickerville by Unexpected Games. They're unexpected. They are unexpected. All right, and we're out.