The people demand takes, so get ’em while they’re hot. We’re weighing in on some possibly bad, certainly edgy opinions, and deciding where we land (spoiler: we’re always right). Before we get heated, we talk about Diplomacy: The Golden Blade, and Cozy Stickerville.
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If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
01:46 – Diplomacy: The Golden Blade 12:33 – Cozy Stickerville 25:41 – Hot takes! 26:11 – Co-op games are just single player games with an audience 32:01 – Catch Up mechanics ruin competitive integrity 37:39 – Legacy games are a predatory waste of money 41:22 – If a game takes more than 30 minutes to teach, it’s a bad design 45:56 – Player elimination is actually a good mechanism 47:36 – Hidden victory points are a cowardly design choice 51:38 – Gateway games Like Catan or Monopoly should be actively avoided 52:44 – House ruling a game means you bought the wrong game 53:10 – Theme is a myth 54:13 – Kickstarter deluxe editions are actively ruining the hobby
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
Board game designers Reiner Knizia and Markus Slawitscheck both have a shot of completing an unprecedented series of wins at this year’s Spiel des Jahres – widely considered the highest profile awards in board gaming – after the 2026 nominations were unveiled earlier today.
The pair have already won two of the awards’ three categories in prior years – and the nominations of Slawitscheck’s Morty Sorty Magic Shop for the main prize, and Knizia’s Rebirth for the higher complexity Kennerspiel, could see either or both become the first designers in the awards’ 47-year history to complete the set.
Morty Sorty Magic Shop is up against Corey Konieczka’s Cozy Stickerville and Martin Ang’s Dito! – the German version of Jinxo – for this year’s Spiel des Jahres, while Rebirth is contending with Michael Palm and Lukas Zach design Boss Fighters QR and Donald X Vaccarino’s Moon Colony Bloodbath for the Kennerspiel.
Spiel des Jahres Association chairman Harald Schrapers said in a nominations livestream today that the jury looked at a record 571 games for this year’s awards, underscoring the sheer mass of games being released through retail.
The 440 titles reviewed across the Spiel and Kennerspiel categories was up 14% on last year, while the 92 games considered for the Kinderspiel marked a roughly 50% rise compared to the 61 from 2025. Another 39 titles were considered by judges across both the Spiel and Kinderspiel awards.
Number of games reviewed in recent Spiel des Jahres years – red is Spiel and Kennerspiel, blue is Kinderspiel, and purple is games which span both segments
Despite those record numbers, Schrapers pointed out that just 2.3% of the games were from women designers, with male creators making up 94% of the cohort, and the rest being designed by mixed teams.
That figure has barely moved in recent years, having stood at 2% in 2025 and 2.6% in 2024 – an ongoing lack of diversity highlighted in great detail in this excellent feature by Wargamer’s Mollie Russell earlier this week.
Schrapers also emphasised that this year’s judging process had been a particularly frustrating one, with glaring flaws being present in even the standout designs.
He said, “It was a lot of fun, but there were also real shortcoming in many games.
“There are deficiencies in some games every year, of course – there are so many, not all of them are really good. Many are good, but as I said, not all of them.
But this time we noticed, especially with the outstanding games, i.e. the 10% best – I would say there were various games where there were various quite serious flaws. There were so many that I even wrote them down.”
He presented a list which included incomplete, ambiguous, and contradictory rules of the game, a lack of summaries, blatantly incorrect age information on boxes, and components which fail to function well in poor light or after a handful of games.
Schrapers said in a separate blog post about the process, “Despite these shortcomings, some titles made it onto the jury’s shortlist because the flaws were not so significant in relation to the outstanding gameplay.
“However, there were probably more than one work that failed to secure a majority in the jury vote due to such a deficiency.”
Spiel des Jahres deputy chairman Christoph Schlewinski, left, and chairman Harald Schrapers, right, with this year’s Spiel des Jahres nominees
The livestream also drew attention to the nomination of Boss Fighters QR, and the long-listed design Toriki: The Castaway Island, as notable for requiring an app in order to play.
When asked by Spiel des Jahres deputy chairman Christoph Schlewinski whether that signified a growing trend within the hobby, Schrapers said, “No, I don’t think that’s a trend.
“They are two games that work very well with an app… the thing is that the app supports the analogue feeling in such a game. That’s why it’s an addition.”
He added, “I’m really sure that even in ten years, 90% or even more of all board games will work without a digital integration, because that’s exactly what people like.
“But an app also draws new people into this game. We notice it especially with young people that they often find this very , very good, it creates additional tension – and you can see that such a board game can also open up new audience groups.”
Hisashi Hayashi’s co-operative bomb disposal game Bomb Busters won last year’s Spiel des Jahres, beating the much-fancied push-your-luck card game Flip 7 to the high-profile award.
That victory meant the Spiel des Jahres has now been won by a co-operative game design in five out of the past seven years, following successes for Just One in 2019, MicroMacro: Crime City in 2021, Dorfromantik: The Board Game in 2023 and Sky Team last year.
Cozy Stickerville is the only nominee for the main prize this year which is a cooperative title.
Last year’s Kennerspiel des Jahres was won by Endeavor: Deep Sea – which also features a prominent co-op mode as a way to play the game – while the winner of the 2025 Kinderspiel was Wolfgang Warsch’s Topp die Torte.
Winning the Spiel des Jahres can explode sales by hundreds of thousands of copies for the winner – and by thousands of copies for the nominees.
While publishers tend to keep tight-lipped about actual sales figures, Pegasus Spiel co-founder Karsten Esser told BoardGameWire in a 2023 interview that winning the main prize can boost a game’s sales by 10x to 20x in the months following, due to a slew of exposure across mainstream German shopping outlets in the run-up to Christmas.
That kind of boost can be hugely impactful for publishers and designers alike – and is particularly important to smaller publishers in the fight to stand out amid an increasingly competitive industry which sees thousands of releases each year.
The winners of this year’s Spiel des Jahres awards are set to be announced on July 12.
I’m deeply suspicious of “cozy.” For much the same reason I’m suspicious of “nostalgia,” come to think of it. In the mouth of business executives, “cozy” becomes something we already own, or at least already have within our grasp, now repackaged and sold back to us as a subscription service. A monthly box of curated snacks. Ten ideas for cozymaxxing your nostalgia shelf. And that’s before we even consider the way institutions and politicians propose that coziness and nostalgia are the way things “used to be,” before someone came along to take away our picnics and crime-absent streets. What if we could go back to the Way It Was? What if all it took was getting rid of a few undesirables?
In other words, I am way too cranky to be Cozy Stickerville’s target audience. “More like Cozy Fascistville,” I probably frumped to myself. Then I learned it was designed by Corey Konieczka. Then I figured it might be a nice thing to play with my twelve- and six-year-old daughters. Then, as the undertow of commercialism swept my legs out from under me, it appeared in my shopping cart, one click away from arriving at my doorstep within three to five business days.
Then, those three to five business days later, it was winning me over.
Looking for a hidden object.
Cozy Stickerville strikes me as a very Corey Konieczka design. Aesthetically, it bears so little in common with The Mandalorian, Star Wars: Rebellion, and Runewars as to make such a statement nonsensical. But I’m not talking about visuals. I’m talking about the maximalism of the thing. The maximalism contrasted with the sheer action economy.
I’ll explain.
Cozy Stickerville opens on a cozy not-yet-village. Gifted a tract of land by a distant and condescending father — hoo boy, does this game have daddy issues — you immediately take it upon yourself to transform this tract of riverland into a home. Or, in game terms, to affix eight stickers onto a grid, creating a pastoral scene right out of a Western. (Back when there was room for everybody, the cranky part of my brain intones. I tell it to shush. My kids are right there, man.)
From there, Cozy Stickerville slips into a comfortable routine. A cozy routine, one might say. Every turn consists of the metronome rhythm of resolving an event card and then resolving an action. These resolutions are steadfast in their simplicity. Events generally present a decision. Build this or build that. Answer A or answer B. Fulfill a need right now or put it off till later. The actions are more diverse primarily in their range. Some appear on the stickers as entries in a little storybook. Others appear on cards. Most of the time, they also present straightforward options. Gather wood from the ground or spend food to possibly gather some extra. Build a house for an eccentric inventor or build a house for some woodcutters. Plant flowers or pave a road.
Despite this simplicity, the actions very quickly display a wonderful range of possibilities. It isn’t only that stickers will be added, first to the board and then atop other stickers. It’s that their addition unfurls new adventures. Sometimes Cozy Stickerville turns into a hidden object search. Other times, it becomes a resource optimization game. There are branching paths to a spelunked cave, uncovered over many in-game weeks. An observatory on the hill becomes a chance to peek at celestial objects; a post office transforms into a test of how well we’ve come to know our neighbors.
That’s what I mean when I say it feels like a Konieczka design. It has that economy of action but maximalism of discovery that have always been the hallmarks of his design. It feels large inside, certainly larger than I expected of a game about putting stickers on a grid.
Potential actions are easily tracked.
Even the format feels generous.
Over the course of ten sessions, each no longer than half an hour, your village takes shape. Some of that shape is more or less what you would predict from a game called “Cozy Stickerville.” In our town — Happy Riverside Valley, if you care to know the name my girls came up with — we opened a bird-watching tower and animal refuge, a pet shop and a newspaper. We ran for office. We flirted with capitalism, but in a way that wasn’t too destructive. Only two copses of trees were felled, and only one lump of trash came to occupy the area. We dumped it right next to the big golden statue we had erected of ourself, a statement on how it didn’t resemble the way we imagined our unseen avatar.
But at points, Konieczka presents challenges and setbacks. Cozy challenges, to be sure, cozy setbacks. But challenges and setbacks all the same. When we borrowed money from a shady lender, the interest kept coming due at exactly the wrong moment. When we encouraged one character to date another, we were reminded, gently, cozily, that we could instead pursue the romance for ourselves. “Ew!” my girls moaned. When we failed to build a fire station… well, that was the one moment that maybe struck a little too close to my six-year-old’s heart. In real time, we invented the myth of the Farm Upstate, where all ferrets go to live after their house burns down.
These aren’t spoilers, as such. Not really. Mostly, they’re emergent properties, the result of one sticker placed atop another. Or else they’re the common-sense outcome of taking shady loans, engaging in pranks rather than doing your yard chores, or chopping down all of a valley’s trees. Cozy Stickerville sticks to obvious morals, but at least it sticks to them. Is it a spoiler to say that things turn out all right in the end? That you will be vindicated of your father’s disdain? That you will place more stickers on this sticker-grid? The storytelling rarely deposits us in expected places. It’s the trails and switchbacks it travels that are the delight.
Some of the many milestones your village might unlock.
And then, when it’s done, the game permits a second outing. This one is more constrained than the first, flipping the board to its reverse side and using most of the remaining stickers. All those decision cards must be made in the other direction, building the inventor’s house rather than the cabin for the woodcutters, making dialogue choice B instead of choice A, pursuing the agenda you left by the wayside on your inaugural play.
For a legacy game, a format that is often rightly criticized for producing waste, Cozy Stickerville proves only marginally more wasteful than your average children’s stickerbook. I’m not going to pretend it has limitless miles in its soles. There’s no playing the game once it’s finished, unlike some legacies, and the hours contained within are relatively brief.
But those hours and precious ones. I rarely have any trouble getting my kiddos to play board games, but Cozy Stickerville swiftly became such a highlight of our evening routine that it eclipsed all other contenders. My children cooed over their pets, debated where to place every berry bush and flower patch, and quibbled over whether to establish a summer camp or a candy shop. They decoded secret texts with all the reverence of archaeologists and positioned inhabitants with an eye for the view from their bedroom windows. More than once, in between sessions, they discussed which story threads they would pick up next or asked me to open the box so they could study their town. Even before we had finished our first ten-year campaign, upon learning that we could only play the game twice, they asked if they could contribute some of their own money to buying a second copy. Now they insist we should frame the board, spaced halfway between their bedrooms so they can appreciate equal ownership over it.
On the one hand, this doesn’t exactly beat the accusations that Cozy Stickerville is commercialism in a box. But on the other…
Look. I know what our hobby is about for most people. We buy stuff and we sell stuff and hopefully in the middle we enjoy the memories and moments and messages these things create. There’s so much crass commercialism out there, all those boxes of miniatures with barely-developed rules, all the FOMO and churn and Cult of the New.
On the scale of worst offenders, Cozy Stickerville doesn’t even rate. It’s unapologetically cozy, but it also makes good on its word. This is coziness not as a symptom of a culture in decline, or not only that. This is coziness as a shared moment between families. This is coziness as something bespoke and human-crafted, as opposed to slopped from the mouth of the slop monster. This is the coziness of a six-year-old in my lap, eyes glittering as she debates whether to place her kitty near that berry bush or chasing the naughty goose in the lake.
Stickers over stickers! What will they think of next?
I still don’t know whether we’ll buy a second copy. I hope not. Too much of a good thing can spoil its memory. But for those two campaigns, I’m grateful to have bought and played this thing. Because Cozy Stickerville is a reminder that “cozy” is a four-letter word — but so is “love.”
(If what I’m doing at Space-Biff! is valuable to you in some way, please consider dropping by my Patreon campaign or Ko-fi. Right now, supporters can read about which films I watched in 2025, including some brief thoughts on each. That’s 44 movies! That’s a lot, unless you see, like, 45 or more movies in a year!)
Shownotes
Redebedarf. Das Podcastformat ohne Format. Manchmal gibt es einfach Anlässe, Erfahrungen und Beobachtungen zur Spielszene die nur in einem kurzen Podcast untergebracht werden können. Das tun Georgios Panagiotidis und Peer Sylvester mit Redebedarf.
I think it’s fair to say that we crushed this last year (although some of us better than others), so it’s only correct and right that we should return to do it again. What are the best games of 2026 going to be? Well, only we know, but we’re willing to part with that information. Get your fat stacks ready. Before we set ourselves up for failure, we talk about Alibis, Mosaic: A Story of Civilization, and Cyclades: Legendary Edition.
If you don’t want to miss an episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Stitcher/Spotify, or add our RSS feed to your favourite app. Reviews and subscriptions really help us and would be greatly appreciated! To download the episode directly, click here.
If you’d like to discuss anything in the episode, please do so in the comments below, visit our BoardGameGeek guild, join our Discord, or Facebook Group! Any feedback is also always helpful. If you’d like to show your support for the show, we also have a Patreon with some fun rewards, and a merch store!
Timecodes:
03:02 – Alibis 09:18 – Mosaic: A Story of Civilization 23:25 – Cyclades: Legendary Edition 36:27 – Anticipation Auction 2026 41:18 – The Game Makers 44:25 – Cozy Stickerville 46:39 – Brass: Pittsburgh 50:35 – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – Trick-taking Game 54:04 – Revenant 56:21 – World Order 59:31 – Dark Pact 1:02:28 – The Great Library 1:03:56 – Spirited 1:05:25 – Realm of Reckoning 1:08:55 – Avalon: The Riven Veil 1:12:57 – La Pâtisserie Rococo 1:14:24 – Nippon: Zaibatsu 1:17:24 – Rewild: South America 1:18:44 – Movers & Shakers
Thank you to Heart Society for generously letting us use What’s On Your Mind, Kid? from their album Wake the Queens.
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