There’s been an increase in so-called cozy games, but I feel that it’s gotten a boost lately. Maybe it’s the increasingly harsh reality of the world or a change in the target audience, where theme and art have become more important? I don’t know, but since I’m a sucker for pretty pictures, I can totally live with that. 😉 There are the good and the bad in the genre, but that’s all okay—nowadays there are enough games on the market, so there’s definitely something out there for everyone.
I just called cozy games a ‘genre’, which of course isn’t really a thing, since cozy is a subjective term—people find different things cozy. For me, a cozy game is one with a softer theme (nature/fantasy/life), that’s gentle on the eyes, and doesn’t require you to burn your brain. Examples? Forest Shuffle but I’d almost call Distilled a cozy game too, although it might be a tad long.

Speaking of shorter games… we played loads of them last week! It was the week of small games, somehow.

We started with an all-time favorite: Kombo Klash! We’ve only ever played it with just two players and still need to try it with three or four. If you don’t know this game and you like a light, quick, and fun strategic game on a grid with loads of combo options, this is one to check out. Alas, the game is out of print, so you might want to grab a copy if you ever come across it.

Heinze played a game of Air, Land, and Sea: Critters at War and it’s still a perfectly good lane battler. I’m still surprised that this reskin version exists, although I can see how the original might be ignored by a lot of potential players just because of its straightforward art. This one just looks way more interesting and has humor, with amazing art by Derek Laufman.

We had some time to kill after a little walk in the evening and grabbed the game Dirt and Glory. It’s a Blackjack-inspired card game we got at Spiel last year, and it’s a simple but fun push-your-luck game. It has a fun element where each player has “reserved cards” besides their draw deck. At the start of every round, you draw two cards, play one, and the other goes to your reserved pile. These cards can be accessed through some card abilities or by spending fuel tokens. It gives this highly luck-based game a little strategic bite.

On Friday, we had friends over and quickly assessed that everybody had had a long week—we weren’t going to play a longer game that night. Smaller games it was! One friend brought an extremely silly game he bought at a flea market: Kneedfeest (“kneading party”). What can I say… it was Pictionary with funny-smelling clay. One member of both teams got the same word they had to “visualize,” and the team that guessed it correctly first got to take a piece of clay away from the other team. The team that runs out of clay first loses the game.

After that, we played Moving Wild with six players. That was a completely different experience from playing it with just the two of us. Because you get to draft way less cards, the game is a lot harder! Still a lovely drafting game for such a tiny box. From one Oink game, to another and we played A Fake Artist Goes to New York and we realized that we’ve been playing it wrong all this time. We’ve never announced a ‘theme’ before handing out the assignments, meaning it’s been incredibly hard for the fake artist all this time. The night continued and since the mood status was “LOL” we continued that by playing a game of Ransom Notes, a silly party game with word magnets.

This weekend, Heinze and I felt like playing at least one bigger game, and we decided on a game of Root! Root isn’t at its best with two players, but we wanted to try and see if adding the Hirelings and the Landmarks to the game might change that. The Landmarks were a fun twist, and the Hirelings made things quite interesting—their benefits for the player who controls them are not to be underestimated. Heinze played The Hundreds, but we both concluded that that faction is probably more fun to play when there are more than two players. In the end, scoring was very close! I was only one point short of victory with The Dutchy, despite being almost completely wiped off the map by Heinze’s annoying Commander.