The nights are drawing in, shorts are condemned to the back of the drawer for another 9 months, and you’re teetering on the edge of turning the central heating back on. That’s right – it’s Autumn, or Fall for my transatlantic friends. Time to hunker down with warm, comfy things, and that includes games.
The overuse of the word ‘cosy’ in the last few years drives me batty. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea and the feeling. A cosy mystery is my idea of a good time. But ‘cosy’ in board game circles seems to revolve around cartoon anthropomorphic animals making cakes, or coffee, or hosting jazz poetry slams or whatever. In this guide, I’ll skirt around the obvious choices (no shade on Flamecraft; it has its place) and tell you about the games I think of as perfect for a cosy night in while the wind and rain are kept at bay by your windows.
Without further ado, here are seven games you should be playing during cosy times.
Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective: The Baker Street Irregulars
Bit of a mouthful there, but The Baker Street Irregulars is superb. This is not your normal cosy game. There are no red pandas running a florist here; instead, you’re trying to solve a string of crimes across Conan Doyle’s London.
There’s no board, no timer, no rounds, nothing at all, in fact, which would lead you to think of it as a board game. Instead, you unfurl a map, scour newspaper pages, dive into the directory and try to figure out what the latest clue means.
I played (and reviewed) this game a few years ago, and fell in love with it. Just me, a table, a whisky on ice (substitute for a cup of tea if you’re that way inclined) and a couple of hours sleuthing. No background noise, save for the weather lashing at the house, just me and my brain trying to emulate Sherlock.
There are plenty of things which sound good in principle but don’t live up to expectations, but Baker Street Irregulars is not one of them. It surpassed my expectations. There are three other Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective boxes available, but take my advice and just go for the Baker Street Irregulars one. The writing and the mysteries are superb. Get the fire on and get investigating.
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The Baker Street Irregulars
1-8 Players | Ages 14+
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Root
Oh. Em. Gee. I’ve done a complete U-turn on my anthropomorphic animal annoyance and picked Root. What a hypocrite. Whatever, this is my place, so I make the rules up as I go. Nobody says cosy and heavy have to be mutually exclusive. The same could be said of cutesy animals and warfare.
Root’s gorgeous woodland artwork, courtesy of the suspiciously talented Kyle Ferrin, belies what is basically a COIN (counter-insurgency) game. That’s right, Root belongs right next to Gandhi: The Decolonization of British India 1917-1947 as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I reviewed Gandhi right here.
Root does away with historical conflict in favour of different animal factions seeking dominance. It’s a heavier game than the box suggests, and learning it is a bit of a bear(!) because the factions are asymmetric in terms of actions, pieces, and goals. But oh boy, is the juice worth the squeeze.
Picture it: you and your friends sat around a table with lamps lighting the room. Night has drawn its shades across your windows, and you’ve nowhere to be and nothing to do for the next two hours. Feel the warmth of little wooden animals battling for superiority over woodland, lakes, mountains and all manner of settings with the various expansions.
Cosy doesn’t have to be lightweight. Flex your grey cells and get stuck in. If you want to know more, read my review of Root and some of the expansions by clicking here.
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Root
2-4 Players | Ages 14+
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Atiwa
There had to be an Uwe Rosenberg game in here, I just had to decide which. I was sorely tempted to choose Nusfjord, but in the end the warmer climes of Ghana and the little bat meeples of Atiwa beat out fish and Norwegian chills. I reviewed Atiwa a while back, and it still sits proudly on my shelf.
Atiwa is a worker-placement / action-selection game about expanding a village in Ghana through the magic of Fruit Bat husbandry. The game mimics real life, and there’s a supplement in the box which tells you all about it. The idea is that by planting fruit trees, you attract the bats. The bats eat the fruit, fly away, and poop. The bat guano later becomes more trees, leading to more fruit and more bats. You get the idea.
If you’ve played any of Uwe’s games in the past, bits of Atiwa will feel immediately familiar. It’s nowhere near the weight of a game like A Feast For Odin, and it feels more forgiving than Nusfjord. It’s just the right balance of complexity and accessibility, which is why it remains one of my first recommendations from Rosenberg’s back catalogue. A bit like someone suggesting Nevermind before Bleach when you got into Nirvana in your teens.
Another feather in Atiwa’s cap is that it lets you use Uwe’s trademark solo system, where you use multiple sets of workers, and those you place in one round are left to block you in the next. A lovely puzzle to chip away at while The Great British Bake Off plays in the background.
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Atiwa
1-4 Players | Ages 12+
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Come Sail Away
I could have lazily picked pretty much any of Saashi & Saashi’s titles in this list. Takako Takarai’s artwork is full of the familiar feel of childhood books, which invariably make a lot of people feel cosy. But instead of being lazy, I’ve opted for the game I think best fits the bill: Come Sail Away.
Come Sail Away is a game about welcoming guests aboard your golden-age cruise ship. You drop each guest off in adjacent rooms, Mancala-style, trying to ensure those who score well together end up in the same spaces. It feels like a ‘proper’ board game, despite the fact your board is just some tiles lined up next to one another.
Like other games on this list, I think it’s the puzzly aspect of Come Sail Away, which means it pushes its way into this list. There’s no time pressure, and it feels like you’re doing something nice. It’s not like Misery Farm Simulator Agricola where the aim of the game is just to survive. You’re putting happy holidaymakers on a big ship to go eat, drink, and dance the cruise away.
Come Sail Away is just a nice time. It won’t take up more than about an hour of your time, leaving you with the rest of the evening to get your feet up in front of Poirot while you drink hot chocolate. If you want to know a bit more about it, head over to my review.
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Come Sail Away
1-4 Players | Ages 10+
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The Lord of the Rings: The Duel for Middle-earth
When I think of cosying up in the autumn and winter, I think of The Lord of the Rings. The first three movies came out around Christmas for three years running, and when I’ve got nowhere to be, and the rain is lashing down outside, there’s not much that tops spending Sunday with back-to-back Tolkien.
So what better way to spend an hour with your significant other/housemate/overly familiar ghost than a LOTR-themed duel?
The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth takes the excellent two-player format of 7 Wonders: Duel and builds on it. Surprisingly, for a game which is essentially a Hobbity cash-in with a reused formula, Duel for Middle-earth does a magnificent job of carrying the theme. One player plays as Mssrs Baggins and Gamgee, while the others play as the Nazgul, trying to trip them up before they take the ring to Mt Doom for recycling.
It’s a great game, has a really small footprint (meaning it’s coffee-table friendly), and is done in less than an hour. Highly recommended, especially for Tolkien fans. If you want to know a bit more about it, check out my review right here.
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Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth
2 Players | Ages 10+
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Kamisado
Maybe you’re not into board games as people like me think about them. Your idea of a board game is chess, or draughts (checkers for my American friends). Luckily, I’ve got something for you too.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Chess or Go, but you might want something a bit different. Maybe something without the mental overhead of either of those games. There are a ton of good, modern abstract strategy games out there, but the one I’ve gone for here is Kamisado.
On first glance it looks a little bit chessy, albeit with fewer pieces and a lot more colour. Kamisado has a really basic ruleset that feels like it’ll be about as deep as a dinnerplate full of water, but the truth is that there’s a lot more there.
You always move forward, either straight or diagonally. Whatever colour square you end on is the colour of the piece your opponent has to move next, and so on. If you get a single piece to the other side of the board, you win.
Like I say, very easy to understand, quick to play, and just the thing for an hour in the evening. Maybe even take it with you down to the local for a couple of drinks while you’re warming by their fire. Check it out.
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Kamisado
2 Players | Ages 8+
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The Quiet Year
Something a bit different now. If you like the idea of exploration and storytelling, but without the rigmarole of a full-on Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I can recommend The Quiet Year.
I originally played The Quiet Year online during lockdown. All you need is something to draw on (even a screen if you’re that way inclined) and a deck of cards. The game revolves around creating a map of the wilderness that surrounds you. You’re part of a community rebuilding after the collapse of whatever world came before. It starts off small, but by the end of the year you’ve created a living, breathing little world of your own.
Every time you draw a card from the deck, you refer to the game’s book, which tells you what happened. It might be a good omen. It might be bad news. It might be something completely different. Things will change, though, and you’ll add things to the map to show exactly what’s happened.
The best part? You don’t even need to go out and get it. You can head over to their website and buy the PDF version of the game. Within five minutes of reading this, you could be playing The Quiet Year.
What better way to spend a couple of contemplative hours than to sit in your favourite chair with a pen and paper, or your trusty iPad, and let your imagination run riot?
Over to you
Go on then. Tell me where I got it wrong. How on Earth is any of this nonsense meant to be cosy?? Tell me your own, personal cosy hits that hit for you, if not everybody else.
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