Cozy Board Game Review - Tulikko, Countryside, Garden Lake, and Koinobori
/pic8758132.jpg)
Transcript
Cozy games, well, autumn is coming here in Australia or spring in America if you are there. Hello American friends.
And Europe and Europe.
And Europe. So, now we're talking about four games that I would considered cozy games and I'll we will tell you why they are cozy in a way.
Yeah, they're cozy themed games. This is a rapid fire review video. We're going to give you a quick review for each of these four games that we've played over the recent time.
And these are the games that released recently so and they are already out. So, they're not they're not prototypes so you can just go and get them if you like what you see.
Yes. We have Countryside, Tokaido, Garden Lake, and Aqualin and Bora
I'm going to start with Tokaido.
Yes. Tokaido is a tile drafting and placement game which is thematically set around some of the northern mythology around Aurora Aurora Borealis. And it is a game with a nice little tile drafting uh gimmick here. And I don't mean gimmick in a bad way, but it's got a a little gimmick to it. So, you have a stack of tiles that is your own. Every turn, you'll take one of these. You will slide it into one of these four. Oops, I slid that too hard. Let's try that again. I have to be cozier about it.
Yeah, it's cozy games after all, Terrence.
Slot it in, take the tile that comes out the other side, and it must be placed on a space
on your own player board.
on your own player board that matches the icon shown here. Once you've done that
Yeah, can be here, here, anywhere with this logo.
Yes. Uh you have 12 tiles here so you're not going to completely fill your board. When you make a non-matching pair, you connect them with a river. And when you make a A pair, let's Yes, this works out. Place that here. You mark it with one of your tokens. You're trying to create certain patterns, either specific color patterns, a fully completed section of that shape, or a river path of that shape. When you complete that, you get to put two discs up here. There's a few other objectives that you can take up here with the Auroras. So, when you have three tiles of a given type, you would get that Aurora and it gives you a once-off bonus.
And these are also randomly selected each game?
Yes, there is a big stack of these so that they are always different. And it's basically a race to get all of your tokens out. So, you can think of these circular tokens as being worth two points and these river tokens as being worth one. Uh at the end of a round, if only one player has got all of them out, then they win. They've won the race. And if you get through 12 rounds and everyone is out of tiles and no one has won in that way, then you just count up the You count up the points worth of tokens you have left. And whoever has the the fewest remaining is the winner.
Which is I think so far it's the sort of less likely things to happen. Usually, somebody would race and then finish their tokens first and then that person wins.
Yes.
It's very good. It's race to finish your tokens and it is very It's tile placement. It is cozy. And it's also race to something, right? You need some sort of race com- competitions in between players, right?
Yes.
So,
These ones actually aren't race. These are Anyone can complete these, but the Auroras here for those bonus abilities, those are the race. So, it's trying to get sets of all the same ones as quickly as you can.
I enjoy this game because it is different. This gimmicky, again, this is not in a bad term and not in a um pejorative term. So, this is really cool, I think. You can to some degree plan what you're going to get, but then your opponent will do something, it will ruin your whole life, and that's okay, that's just a game.
Yeah. Uh look, this is a nice simple filler for me.
it's pretty quick.
Um it it will fill Yeah, it's very quick to explain. It will fill the gap between two games. It doesn't do anything particularly new in the tile placement world. I guess maybe the placement of these rivers I do like placing things between tiles, so maybe that's a difference, and it is nice and tactile, so and very pretty box as well, so yeah, there we go. Nice little filler.
Yeah. Taran, let's go to countryside.
Nothing more cozy than relaxing by the countryside.
Mhm, then this is the game, countryside. This is one of the Essen 2025 releases, and this is a cozy game where you do countryside stuff.
I don't know. I don't live in countryside, I wouldn't know.
I will explain the rules, and we'll see what it's about.
And maybe then you want to live on countryside, maybe not.
This is fundamentally a tableau building game. It has a personal worker placement kind of puzzle to it. And so, every turn you're going to take one of your meeples, and you're going to pick one of your unblocked actions. And it will let you do something. It might let you take a whole lot of cards, so you've got a tableau of seven cards here. And you're always taking in chunks. So, here if I were picking up four cards, I would be taking four adjacent cards before replenishing them. So, that's always an interesting feature as you try to hunt through the deck for the cards that you need. And some of the major things you're trying to do is play cards. You kind of grow them in your countryside using sunlight, so this This let me play a card that costs up to five sunlight.
Or I could pay above five sunlight as long as I could make up the difference in coins.
Pretty much like a type of power. It looks like sun, but it's not sun. Like a rechargeable battery, but not rechargeable battery and not sun, which is coin. Anyway, continue. Very cozy.
So, it is a tableau builder. When you play a card, it's got to go on a a landscape card or location card that has one of the matching types. So, you've got to join these things up. And it will have some effect that resolves or combos with other cards. So, here for example, I've put a cow into my barn. It gains one milk. And this kind of has uh that Through the Ages kind of mechanism where here I've got some empty baskets, a bank of baskets, so to speak, and then I put one on the cow, and now that is a basket of milk. And then if I ever were to sell that, it becomes a coin, and I've got a limited pool of those. So, I've got to manage that. Uh once you uh you take one action per turn, and then you can also take a retrieval action.
So, your turn can be to retrieve your workers, and then you get a number of market actions and extra cards based on how many you retrieve. So, you're trying to manage that. The game is then all about You can get more of these locations as well, so they can have more areas, and they have a limit to how many cards can go on them. The game is ultimately all about trying to form combinations to meet these goals. So, most of your points are going to come from resolving goals. That's this action here. I would need to achieve two of these goals. It might be discarding coins. It might be having certain combinations of cards, having three people cards, things like that. And I would mark them with my goal markers. That would give me the points that I've covered. There's a little bit of a race there.
And it also unlocks more actions. So, once you clear these goal markers off, you've got better actions. You've got the ability to do more goals or more more card builds at once. So, it all starts to escalate. And then once someone gets off the end of the map, map
track
off the end of the track, that will trigger the end and whoever's got the most points there wins.
the map, which is actually is um
Yes, different sets of objectives, different combinations of objectives.
It's really cozy theme. It's still cozy as well until somebody took the cards that you want, took the goals that you want, and then no longer cozy. No, it's still cozy.
It does feel cozy. Obviously, it's got a very warm pastel feel to it, and that's the that's the coziest thing of all here.
Yes, it is it is cozy because you are trying to maximize your production, right?
Yes.
Oh, it's like it's Oh my goods as well. Um
It does have a very Oh My Goods-y feel to it. I definitely felt that as well, the way things chain together and chain between cards.
cards as well.
Yep.
I I do like that kind of game, and I do like what's happening here. You try to maximize that. You're trying to do it's your own worker placement worker placement personal area, which you cannot upgrade yourself by completing goals. So, that's really like you really want to complete goals so you can have a better action. So, they two are actually feeding each other, which I really love.
Yeah, other than there's a little bit of a race for the goals, but in most cases there's enough versions of each goal. They just get a little bit weaker. Uh sometimes you need to There There's a limited number of some of the cards, and so sometimes you really need to compete for the cards you want to make some of these combinations because uh particularly these uh location cards, they also have goals on them. So I showed you putting goals up there, but you're also trying to get Here for example, it would be spending three cherries. So three cherry baskets to get two points when you complete a goal. So if I'm going to do that, I have to find enough cherries and enough cards that grow cherries on those trees cuz they don't just grow by themselves.
No, you have to make an effort to grow like in real life.
Mhm.
It's too real.
And once you've done the goals, that the cards don't go back in. So especially if you're playing at four players, that can get pretty tight. But it's still again, you're you're playing within your own space mostly. And it just exudes that warmth. So it's a neat it's a neat little game.
game. I I think the month we played this, we had lots of lots of other great games, so it didn't quite make made my top five, but it's it's really neat. It's really pretty. And it is hopefully they have it outside Essen and then you can just find it for you know, just combo engine building, timing sensitive at times game.
Yes. What I would say is it doesn't it doesn't necessarily do that much that's new. What it does is quite well Yes. Quite well linked together and linked together and it does it well. Doesn't necessarily do anything new. It's got a little bit of a a barrier to entry as well with how many icons there are that look quite similar. So getting used to all of that is definitely going to take a play, but once you're through with that, yeah, there's there's some nice combos to be played here.
From countryside, we are going to do another cozy thing, which is probably thematically still on the countryside, is to tend our pond. So this is Garden Lake. It's a garden, it's a lake, it's both.
And both are cozy. What could be cozier than a garden lake?
With fish and lotus leaves.
Yes. Well, this is an Uwe Rosenberg polyomino game, which you can immediately see when we go down to the table because he has so many games that have this kind of layout. Patchwork and Cottage Garden, was it Indian Summer? A lot of these games with your uh with your circles and queues of of polyominoes.
And this is seven.
Yes, all of these are seven-piece polyominoes. And overwhelming as all these pieces look, as usual, you've got limited choice on what you can take. So, if it's my turn, I can take one of the two from my own ends or the left end of my neighbor to the right or the right end of my neighbor to the left. Which, if we're playing two players, would wrap around, but if not, it would it would be whoever's in that equivalent position here. And then I just pick one of them and I put it somewhere.
You can place it anywhere. It doesn't have to be adjacent. Basically, anywhere.
Yes. And that is that is the core of the whole game. Uh what you are trying to do is make rows and columns that are completely filled and you're trying to make clusters of seven or more fish and seven or more lily pads.
Cuz these are double-sided. You can choose either side, no problems.
Yes. Uh there's also a part where you're trying to surround these pieces. These are your decorations. If you can surround them on all sides uh don't have to surround them on corners, but if you surround them on all sides, so let's
Pretend that those are legals, like breaking 1,000 rules what he just said, but pretend that this legal.
I need something with an L shape on it. Yes, I'm taking
I'm not better than that.
And like that. It's tough to put seven seven pieces seven dot pieces together. But when you surround one of those, it allows you to place a decoration. And those decorations then make your clusters of lily pads or fish worth more.
Mhm.
And so that is as I said, pretend I wasn't taking pieces from all over the place. It was only from the hands. And you just keep going until nobody can place anymore. So there's no end game timing risk. You're just working your own puzzle and trying to take the pieces that you need. Now where this game is I It is tough to put seven to tessellate these seven piece seven square pieces together. And that's where all of these bonus tiles come into play. So if you cover one of these uh faded L's, you get one of these L shapes. If you cover one of these faded squares, you get one of these single squares. And if you completely fill in a say one of these four rows, you would get this two piece. If you completely filled one of these rows, you'd get this three piece. And so on.
And the columns as well. Uh you can store one of those. Uh but you can only hold one in storage at the end of your turn. And so what you actually see is this kind of escalation towards the end where you're finally you're trying to you're you know you're leaving just enough space for all of these bonuses. And then you start to snowball the bonuses at the end. So it kind of keeps things interesting and alive as it goes on. And it's going to feel really tough. But then as you get all these bonuses, it will kind of come together.
Yeah, cuz sometimes you just see like one bonus and you've got these extra tiles which fill up and trigger another bonus and then another bonus and that could happen. That's actually ideally that's what you want to happen.
Yes. This is This is a neat little game. Yeah, put it in the Telelink and it's it'll play a little longer than Telelink, but put it in Telelink's category of being a simple to teach filler polyomino tile placement in this case polyomino game. It certainly doesn't have that back and forward nastiness that a Patchwork might have. But, yeah, if you like Certainly if you like polyomino games, this is going to work well for you and you don't have to think too hard about
because
Lots of objectives.
They're four at a time and that's it. So, you can just If you are a bit like me where you need to take it and then test it, you can at least they are four. As long as you remember where you took it from, I guess. That's the only like, "Oh, where is it from?"
Yep. And there's not that many different ways to score. It's just one point per row, one point per column, two points per group or cluster, and an extra two points for each decoration that cluster touches. So,
simple to think through. And that That's what makes it cozy.
Let us transport you now to Japan. It's still cozy and it is to do with socks. Wind socks to be exact.
Yes, what could be more cozy than watching wind socks fluttering in the breeze?
and this is Koinobori by Devir Games.
I know it feels cozy to me when we drive around the Western Ring Road and they've got all those The wind socks hanging on the I think they're not as uh
Pretty as this?
They're not as pretty as this that I'm looking at little fish, but
Still connected to the previous game, Garden Lake.
Yes. This is a light I guess you'd call it a stock speculation game to some extent. Uh Each player has their own flag pole and then there are common flag poles based on how many players there are. And you begin down the bottom of your flag pole. On your turn, you can take cards from this seven-card display, or you can play cards, and you've got a hand limit for cards. When you take cards, they have to come from one of the ends of this row here. So, I could take either this or this for my single card, and then once this has been reduced to three or fewer cards, that replenishes it to seven. When you play a card from your hand, you've got a couple of choices. You can play it onto one of the festival poles, and there might be a bonus effect here.
This one would let me pick up another card, for example. Or you could play it onto your personal pole. And when you do that, you do it secretly. So, you play it face down. You cover the lowest part of your pole, and it will upgrade your action capability. So, here I could now take two cards with an action instead of one. Uh hand limit will increase, and then ultimately you can play cards more quickly. Each of these festival poles can have a total of uh five cards added to it. And so, when each of the five flagpoles has five koinobori cards on it, that's what's going to trigger the end, and then you go and count count up your scores in that stock speculation kind of way.
So, you know, all fluttering in the breeze. Look how Look how nice it looks.
Very nice, and very not smelly.
Yes.
Unlike your socks. Kidding.
Yeah, we shouldn't
We shouldn't put my socks up the
Sorry. Up the flagpole. Everyone's socks, come on, like, you know.
My socks. So, players have collectively been doing these, and they've been doing their own personal flagpoles. And what you then do is you go through each pole and work out which uh koinobori type has the majority. So, here for example, there are three of these sort of dark purple maroon ones.
Three, yeah.
And everything else has two. So, that is going to score That means these are going to score positive. So, if every one of those of that color that I have on my personal flagpole, I'm going to get some points. And you move along there's a if they're tied then you just ignore them and go to the next color.
Mhm.
Um a color type could score twice.
Think one for example.
Here pink has dominated so I've got three pinks down here. I'm going to get a point for each of my pinks and this is going to flip.
Just the majority there.
Here I think we have uh three black, four four maroons so maroon's going to score again.
Mhm.
Here we've got
Green maybe.
Uh four dark green four maroons so they cancel each other and then we come down to the three orange. I'm going to score for my orange.
So, technically it is cozy but it could be a little bit brutal as well at the end. If you miscalculated your stock manipulation and then ba baow.
Yes, which is always a risk but at least it's going to be fluttery when you do it.
Yeah, of course.
So, ultimately you'll get points for all of those and then any coin of war that you have that did not uh end up the majority on a flagpole is going to lose you three points.
Per thing.
per thing. So, whoever gets the most points out of all of that is going to win.
Yes, it's quite quick and it is something that okay, it's something a little bit different so although the rules are simple, there's something that a little bit okay, so how does that work? Proper thing, you know, intuitive and new but it's pretty quick play and it's very as I say just before, it could be very brutal.
Yeah, I think it it all depends how interactive you get out here. If you are cuz you can either play this game watching what's becoming a majority and then trying to feed into that. Or you can try to snipe in on the last couple of cards and ruin a majority that one or two other players have clearly been building to. And there's just enough time to make that happen.
You want to build your engine as well. You kind of like want to play it early so that you get stronger actions, but if it's too early, then you are hedging on a different or on a wrong fish stock and that's it.
Yes.
Yeah.
So this is a filler game. It's a really nice filler game cuz it does have that that little bit of of thought and interaction. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, just like deeper strategy to it.
Yeah.
So out of the four games which one you have played, which one that you think most interesting? Please let us know in the comments. And if you have any other cozy games that you have played recently, please let us know. I mean, there's also Cozy Sticker Fell which we have video for it as well, which is very cozy. It's like super the coziest game ever. It's stickering cooperative building a village together with other players. But please do let us know in the comments. And thank you so much for watching. Hopefully you have a great day. See you next time. Bye.