The 9 Best Cozy Games to Play This Winter
Top pick
Utterly addicting and oozing with charm, this cozy game involves running your own tavern, and it’s among the best entries of the year.
When Tavern Keeper came out, I lost sleep for an entire weekend. This management game whisks you away to different fantasy worlds — like an arid canyon that feels inspired by Zelda’s Goron City or a Halfling village straight out of The Hobbit — and it asks you to start your own tavern from scratch. You’ll receive a preexisting building to clean up and redecorate, and while you can completely customize the inside, you can’t change the fundamental layout. This creates a welcome challenge: Trying to cram the necessary taprooms, storerooms, staff rooms, and more into the limited space becomes part of this fun and refreshing puzzle. To establish your tavern and build a reputation, you’ll have to balance your earnings, hire and manage staff, purchase and stock beverages, and even create your own food menu. In the campaign mode, you’ll also have to complete various objectives and make narrative choices along the way.
Tavern Keeper also offers the option of customizing every piece of furniture, and this is easily a mini-game on its own. Any placeable item or surface can be redesigned to look a million different ways, and you can share or import designs from other players online. I am regularly dumbfounded by the creativity of other people in the community, and my own design skills feel meager by comparison.
The game in its current state offers three campaign levels and a sandbox mode, and it’s available in Early Access on Steam, which means you could experience some bugs. The developer roadmap promises more on the horizon. But the sandbox mode has already given me an additional 50 hours of delightful play, long after completing the campaign, and I don’t plan on putting it down anytime soon.
