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It was when we needed to choose between two potential settlers (a farmer and aspiring businesspeople) for our village that the Cozy Stickerville board game clicked for me. "Oh," I thought. "It's a choose-your-own Stardew Valley." And if that doesn't sell you on the idea, lord knows what will.
I'd seen fans of the best board games going nuts for this since the beginning of the year, and gosh, I regret all the time I wasted not playing it. Cozy Stickerville isn't your classic head-to-head challenge; rather than scrambling over the broken bodies of your foes to victory, it's a gentle team experience that is impossible to 'lose' in a strict sense. Instead, it's all about making choices and seeing how the consequences impact your story over time. As the name would suggest, you're also permanently adding stickers of buildings, residents, and plant-life to the board. This means everyone's village will end up looking different in short order, providing a rare sense of ownership you don't always see in tabletop gaming.
Your decisions start early. In year one of your settlement, you'll have to decide which of several stickers to place first – including the kind of home you want to have. Many of these feature storybook entries that provide various challenges like fishing or foraging, but they also include either/or decisions that permanently change your town… even if the results won't be obvious until later.
This choose-your-own feature may sound like a gimmick, but from what I've seen so far, it's anything but. These seemingly simple decisions have a butterfly effect on the rest of the 10-session campaign, so it's satisfying to see what happens based on your choices. Allowing mysterious visitors to stay may lead to the construction of a not-at-all-suspicious 'lodge' building, for example, while letting the aforementioned businesspeople settle in your town could result in an influx of industry.
It isn't just about deciding who lives where, though. You'll also need to balance resource management in Cozy Stickerville too, as these are needed to build many of the buildings or homes that become available later. Because there can be time limits on certain options (like seasonal traders who will trade goods for cash, but only until the end of the 'year' AKA the session), making sure you have everything you need becomes a balancing act. My wife and I didn't have enough resources to build a new settler's home before time ran out in year one, for instance, so that'll need to wait until the next session to finish it and earn any resulting rewards. Because more decisions are sure to emerge then as well, things will suddenly start to stack up and we could fall behind unless we're careful.
I suppose time will tell. I'm only at the beginning of my Cozy Stickerville journey, but I'm already all in on it – and it's shaping up to be one of my favorite games of 2026 so far.
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For more tabletop recommendations, don't miss the best family board games or the best 2-player board games.
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