This article contains minor spoilers for Cozy Stickerville.
A Short History of Cosy Gaming
Cosy games are nothing new; Animal Crossing launched on the GameCube back in 2001. Before that, we had Harvest Moon for the Super Nintendo in 1996. In board games, however, the trend is noticeably newer. As the hobby has expanded, particularly after the pandemic, we’ve seen a rise in more casual, "cosy" games. 2021’s A Gentle Rain is a solo game in which you are specifically encouraged not to score yourself, instead aiming for a short, meditative experience. 2022 saw the release of Dorfromantik, an adaptation of the video game of the same name in which one to six players build a village by placing tiles one at a time. There is technically scoring and a light legacy-style progression system, but you can’t lose the game. Dorfromantik saw a sequel in 2024 - Dorfromantik: Sakura - essentially offering more of the same, this time with a Japanese-inspired aesthetic.
Arguably, there have been cosy games around for longer than this. Patchwork released in 2014 to wide acclaim, and Tokaido (2012) is one of the earliest examples I can find of an intentionally "zen" board game. Its designer, Antoine Bauza, has given several interviews over the years talking about how Zen philosophy inspired the game's mechanics. There is also Carcassonne (2000) and many of Uwe Rosenberg’s games that fit the mould in some way or another. I’m inclined to treat all of these as something else, though; "cosy-competitive" is a term I’ve seen thrown around. These games all have firm objectives, win conditions, and clear-cut consequences for your actions. For example, in Tokaido, if you jump ahead too far to grab a particular tile, you risk letting your opponents take their time behind you, sweeping up everything you left.
The Irony of the Stressful Sandbox
This brings me to a few months ago. I’m playing Cozy Stickerville with my two nieces, aged 11 and 8. Both are smart kids, and we play a lot of board games together, but this is our first venture into truly "cosy" gaming, and our first game with consequences that persist between sessions. We’re a couple of games into the 10-game campaign. I’ve been letting the girls take turns while I act as a kind of referee - try getting two sisters to play a fully cooperative game without someone having to be the voice of reason.
Already, I’m noticing a pattern. The 8-year-old makes decisions almost instantly, sometimes without even reading all the text on the card presented to her. "She looks nice, she can live here," she says when presented with two options for villagers to move into town. When given the option to plant flowers or build a road, flowers are picked before she even hears the second choice. The 11-year-old, however, vacillates over every choice, no matter how minor. Every sticker that goes down on the board is agonisingly mulled over, whether it be a field, a town hall, or a single squirrel. This is fine, of course; the game has "cozy" right there in the name. We’re not in a rush to play, and if she’s really taking too long, a small, gentle push is usually enough to prompt a decision.
Until the wedding.
A series of choices over two games had led us to one of the village residents getting married to the player’s cousin. At the wedding, which took place on the 11-year-old’s turn, we were presented with two options: let the wedding go ahead, or object to the union. If dictionaries had video, I could have submitted this as a textbook case of analysis paralysis. We sat in silence for some time while she thought. She asked me what would happen if she broke up the wedding. I reminded her that we can’t possibly know what the future holds. She thought some more. I helped her reason through it: if she lets the wedding go ahead, they’ll get married; if she objects to it, they likely won’t.
"Yes, but what happens if they don’t get married?"
I gave her the full consequence text for each option, but she still couldn’t make up her mind because of potential long-reaching consequences for future games. In the end, we had to settle it by rolling a die. We broke up the wedding. We are now happily married to the resident in question ourselves. All's well that ends well.
Now, the 11-year-old has had moments of analysis paralysis before, but usually we can resolve them. There was something specific about the open-sandbox approach of Cozy Stickerville - the lack of firm objectives, the relatively sparse information given before making choices, and the unknowable quantity of long-term consequences. All of this fed into my eldest niece's anxieties, leading, ironically, to the "cosy" game being far more stressful than her average game of Pandemic.
The Intolerance of Uncertainty
The Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU), simply put, is a tendency to react negatively to uncertain situations and events. I imagine we all have this tendency to some degree, but some of us (my eldest niece included) have a much higher IU than others. Common signs of a high IU include imagining worst-case scenarios, procrastinating on tasks with unknown outcomes, excessive checking and information gathering, excessive worry about potential negative effects, and - crucially for us - difficulty making decisions.
For someone with a high IU, a typically high-stress game such as Dark Souls: The Board Game, with its clear-cut objective to "kill the boss," may actually prove to be less stressful than the cosy games specifically designed to relax us. In a game like Dark Souls, the objective is linear and the path is certain. Only your tactical approach to the climax is in your hands. The execution may be difficult, but in the end, there are only two states: you win, or you lose.
In Cozy Stickerville, however, the execution is easy. Trivial, even. The game offers little to no structural resistance. Instead, it asks you, the player, to define success. The path is utterly uncertain.
The Tyranny of Unmapped Choice
The modern world is obsessed with optimisation. Type the name of the latest high-profile video game release into your search engine of choice and you’ll be flooded with strategy guides, build guides, walkthroughs, and "quickest time to 100%" breakdowns. The modern gamer, therefore, knowingly or not, operates under a phantom pressure to play optimally. In a game like Gloomhaven, this is easily done. You choose characters that play well together, select cards and abilities that optimise your build, and buy equipment and perks to reduce the randomness of the modifier deck.
But in a cosy game - in Cozy Stickerville - how does one optimise? How do you define the optimal choice when your biggest decision this turn is whether to plant a tree or a bush?
Let’s look at Agricola, typically held up as a golden example of a pure, decision-based Eurogame. There is little-to-no luck in Agricola; your success hinges squarely on the choices you make throughout the game. Every consequence of every action can be traced straight down the line to the endgame scoring. Thus, while it is a highly tactical and stressful game, for a literal and analytical mind, it is a paradise.
Cozy Stickerville is not a pure, decision-based Eurogame. Choices are typically presented to you as a simple choice between Option A or Option B, where Option A features a picture of one family and Option B shows a different family. Now, you can cheat slightly and read the blue text showing the immediate consequences, but typically all that text will say is "place sticker X." You have no idea what placing sticker X will do for you in one game’s time, or in five games’ time. The first time a blind choice leads to a negative consequence, it teaches the player to be hyper-cautious. This can easily lead to every micro-decision being treated as a potential trap.
I’ve recently become a father, and one of the things my wife loves telling me is that rules act as a safety net for children. Creating boundaries makes them feel safe. The same is, of course, true in board games. When a game like Cozy Stickerville says, "do whatever you want," it removes that safety net - the handrails that protect us from our own indecision.
Heuristics, Flowers, and Bunnies: The Joy of Blissful Ignorance
Let’s shift focus and look at my younger niece. How is it that two children, sisters raised in the same home by the same parents, approach games (and life) in such wildly different ways? In short, my younger niece is using emotional heuristics, or affect heuristics. This is the act of making decisions based on immediate emotion rather than logic. It allows us to make decisions quickly, even if they are mechanically sub-optimal.
For my younger niece, a rabbit isn’t a crafting resource or a way to make money - it’s a bunny. It doesn’t matter how much the game offers her, whether it's one gold or a thousand; she isn’t going to murder a bunny. For her, the decision space remains tiny because her values are clear, immediate, and unburdened by math.
This has led to our village having absolutely no uniform identity or vision. One child will take a turn and painstakingly place a series of roads, laying each sticker down with the care of a trained surgeon. The other will then slap a cucumber field down completely skew-whiff in the middle of a makeshift housing estate.
Designing for Comfort
Dorfromantik is another cosy game, but it avoids the psychological pitfall that Cozy Stickerville presents. While the game is relatively open, it is always clear to players what their objectives are, what they are aiming for, and how many points they will get for fulfilling each goal. While it can be played simply for the aesthetic harmony of building a beautiful village, it can also be played with the explicit aim of chasing high scores. It's essentially board game Tetris.
I call this "soft structure." Dorfromantik has absolutely mastered this, giving you just enough structure to push you along while leaving you free to just play. You never have to consult rulebooks or appendixes, meaning your flow of play is never interrupted.
A game where I think this soft structure ultimately fails, however, is Sleeping Gods. In Sleeping Gods, players are tasked with exploring a large open world in a steamship. You go from island to island, reading from a massive, choose-your-own-adventure style book, fighting monsters, and completing quests. You have an ultimate objective, but it is vague, and how to complete it is a total mystery at the start of the game. Time is also strictly limited, and quests can be failed if you take too long. The game is completely open, and with so little information to go on during an initial run, it is incredibly easy to play sub-optimally. The system is pretty brutal, and it can feel deeply demoralising to waste turns knowing that you have limited time to fulfil your objectives.
Granted, Sleeping Gods is not a cosy game, and I wouldn’t play it with my nieces until they are a bit older. But it serves to highlight how when a sandbox game says, "Go, be free, do what you want!" it can easily feel like a threat or a trap.
Conversely, when a game such as Dorfromantik asks, "Here’s a tile, what do you think?" the uncertainty leads to collaborative conversation rather than isolation. It proves that the antidote to choice paralysis isn’t removing rules altogether to provide an endless sandbox. Instead, it’s about giving players a very simple set of rules and loose objectives to work towards, without holding their hands on how to complete them.
Conclusion: Leaving Room for the Flowers
All of this isn’t to say that Cozy Stickerville is a bad game. It’s very good, and we’ve had a great time working through its ten-game campaign. But its design poses a very interesting question: how much structure do we actually need in our games?
If you’ve played board games for any amount of time, you’ll have no doubt been part of - or at least privy to - an argument over rules-as-written versus rules-as-intended, or over optimal strategies in a co-op game. All of this comes back to those children inside of us, and that balancing act between our desire for structure versus autonomy. We want to feel safe and secure, but we also want the freedom to do what we want.
Maybe next time you’re playing a game and you can’t decide on the absolute best, most optimal strategy, you should take a lesson from my 8-year-old niece. Stop staring anxiously at the horizon, and just plant the goddamn flowers because they look pretty.
