Cozy Is As Cozy Does: TIPPERARY Review

The intertrons have been ablaze the last few years with the same descriptive word: cozy. Games are cozy. Gamenights with friends are cozy. Game pieces are cozy. 

I can probably rattle off a dozen reasons why cozy games are popular, why games like Wingspan and Cascadia have dominated the top of the pops in the 2020s. Likely, you can, too. But what does it mean for a game to fit the terms cozy? Does it have to be about kittens and croche, fish eggs and bright art and warm colors? 

I don’t think so. I think there’s room to stretch the term cozy a bit. It should not be just about the theme or the components. The game itself should be, well, cozy. Humor me for a bit. 

Let’s say I brought a small box game, you know the size of the Alea shelf boxes. And in that box were some cute little wooden sheep meeples and wooden barrels, along with a half a billion tiles all in different sizes and shapes. On those tiles, there were just six main features: cuddly little meadows, rocks with numbers, distilleries and wheat fields, bogs, and towers. What if there were a spinner — yes, shudder, a spinner! — in the box that dictated what tiles you got to stare at for a minute or so, twisting and turning them around to best fit your tableau? And at the end of ten or twelve rounds, after making whiskey and propagating sheep like astrophage near CO2, you scored up all the points, and congratulated yourself for making the biggest rectangle and the blobbiest meadow of sheep? 

You’ve probably smoked me out already and guessed that there is that game. It’s called Tipperary, and it’s published by Lookout Games, probably best known for their Uwe Rosenberg games like Agricola and Patchwork (but known more to my wife for Bärenpark.) And spoiler alert, we love it way more than any of the tile laying games that Lookout has brought before. 

In Tipperary, designed by Günter Burkhardt, players are competing to build the best version of a village in County Tipperary (apparently a real place miles away from Duson, Louisiana) by grabbing tiles from a central market. I shouldn’t say market, because here’s that word again: Spinner! Yes, Tipperary cleverly features the same spinner mechanic that we found in games like Casper the Friendly Ghost (1959) only infinitely times better. (If you’re trying to visualize the difference between those two games, think the comparison between Rocky’s space ship from Erida to my old Saturn LS.)

Each round (10-12, depending on player count), the first player will flick this ingenious little spinner (and yes, I would have much preferred it to be a dice with five sides and a wild, but I’m sure that was tried in development). The spinner not only points to the five areas that are stacked with two tiles each randomly from the bag, but each of the areas corresponds to one of the player boards. So, if you are the red player, and the spinner stops, you will look for the red castle arrow pointing to two tiles, grab them, put one in your village, and return the other to the spinner area awaiting another turn. 

It’s that simple. Spin, pick up, choose, return. Rinse and repeat. The trick though is in the landmarks on the tiles themselves. Remember that list of six different landscapes? This next part is where their importance comes to play. Right off the bat, you have to add tiles adjacent to each other, all with the goal of building a huge point scoring rectangle. The points you score are exactly equal to the width of your rectangle times the height of your rectangle. As you can imagine, getting your rectangle to 6×10 or 7×8 is one way to score a ton of points in this game. I have both won and lost with those big rectangles, and here’s why.

The other things you are looking for, in descending order, are (a) points from the biggest connected meadow filled with sheep (one point per sheep) and (b) points for building as many distilleries as possible next to wheat fields (the more you build, the more points you score, plus you get bonuses along the way to add more sheep to your meadows.) Or, you could mix and match those two requirements, with a big meadow, but also grab points or special actions from the other tiles. 

I wish I had more games in the collection like this one, that understands that sometimes, gamers just want a cozy puzzle to solve, even if they are competing with other people at the same time. That’s what Tipperary brings to the table, a unique puzzle every game depending on how the tiles came out, and how they were assigned to players by the spinner of fate. It does it in a way that is so intuitive. Even the rules for laying out tiles are easy to teach, just place the tiles orthogonally adjacent to ANY tile. Sure, it was a brain melt in Tenpenny Parks not to touch sides, and sure, it’s a four alarm fire by the end of every Calico game trying to fit those tiles into your cat’s living room. Those games might look cozy, with cozy little themes like fun fairies and kitties, but they aren’t. They are brutes that bludgeon your opponent or your brain. 

Not so Tipperary. Sure, sometimes that spinner of fate looks the other way for a few turns. You might have a whole ton of wheat fields just waiting for workers to shuttle across the tile border to the nearest distillery to make some smooth Irish whiskey. And yet, you pull stone circles and meadows with every pull. But, the game is so short, and so focused on building out a beautiful little village, that even in those games where luck does not seem in your favor, you just clean up and re-rack the game again. 

I was chatting on discord with one of the 5G4D podcast listeners this weekend, and “Jonas” crystalized what I liked about Tipperary from a gamer point of view. Everyone figures out pretty quickly, by game one or two, that one of the keys to scoring well is to build a substantial rectangle (probably at least five by eight or six by seven or some such). But then the meta kicks in. Will you always choose meadow building this game, to get those free points for having sheep in the same meadow (one point per) and maybe a chance at five bonus points if you hav the biggest sheep herd. Or will you chase after the distilleries, hoping to push that whiskey track, but knowing that some of those tiles are hard to place. Or will you go for a mixture of the two, and supplement with bog tiles and stone circle points and a free tower to help you close up that big rectangle? Will your opponents remember what you did last game and try to counteract? There are so many ways to play. 

Plus, it plays five players as simply and smoothly as it plays two. We have not found any appreciable difference in play time among the play counts, and the head-to-head battle of keeping your eye on just one player to beat in the two player version is just as tense and dramatic as the round-by-round fight for the biggest area and biggest sheep meadow in a four or five player game. So, not only is the game cozy because of the cute little box cover and the cute little sheeples and barrels, but the game itself is cozy. It’s smooth playing and allows for table talk amongst the players waiting a minute for one pperson to fit their last piece into the void among the wheat fields. 

I know I’m a hyperbolic gamer. What can I say? I love games. But, it’s the absolute truth that I’ve been playing Tipperary non-stop on BGA since it came out (with one awesome play in person at ChuckCon Two in ‘Bama with Kelly). And since getting my own copy in a trade, I’ve already played a dozen times in person just in the last two weeks (including three separate plays at SoBo 2026). It’s been a long time since I brought a game to my family where as soon as we finish the first game, someone is looking up quickly to say, “hey can we re-rack and play that again”? I love that feeling. Tipperary should have made my top games of 2023, ahead of World Wonders, which is a great game, but just isn’t as imminently replayable as Tipperary. Or as cozy. 

I will guarantee two things if you try Tipperary: (a) You won’t want to play it just once; and (b) you’ll never find another reviewer dumb enough to compare Tipperary to the Casper the Friendly Ghost game. 

Guaranteed. 

Until next time, laissez les bon temps rouler!
— BJ from Board Game Gumbo