This one is also on sale, and as a Canadian, I am obligated by law to play any game with beavers.

Take your standard city logistics planning game and throw in cyclical catastrophes and you have a decent pitch. I’ve followed this game for a while now as the genre has always been of interest. What’s here, in Early Access I should point, it a tough nut to crack.

First, the curve ball is simply that everything depends on water flow, and said water flow (which is an impressive mechanic I must say) goes through periods of drought. You are given tools to conserve and restrict water flows to maintain the life-juices. The tools are basic, and you will likely lose arable land upon each drought until you are well into the game. That effectively means that you know what you need to do, but for most of the game lack to the material to do so, which is quite frustrating. Aside from the first few minutes, the majority of the game will be spent played on max speed mode, as you’re always waiting for things to complete.

Your population of beavers is predicated on housing. They will breed and give birth, and beavers will die of old age. Compared to logistic games with limited populations, you will simply see them as metrics rather than investments. Population control will primarily come through thirst/starvation, which is a rather cold touch.

Production chains are only 2-3 deep (e.g farm, then cook, or log-board-resin) which helps with organizing work areas. There’s very little flat space, and everything needs a path to work, so it’s a bit of Tetris to get it all going. Power is generated either through water current, shame wheels, or wind, and everything outside of farming seems to need it. Logistically, two buildings that need power and that touch each other automatically transfer power, which makes for very interesting daisy chains of production.

Trees are of course the core resource of the game. Cutting and processing them is the foundation for everything, and you are given ample tools to manage this. Renewable oak forests a-plenty. Everything in the game is renewable, making it a quite ecologically driven game.

Progress is gated through a form of research, which operates in 2 phases. First is a very small increment that scales linearly until you unlock an Observatory which exponentially increases research points. The net effect is feeling starved until you reach a point where there’s simply too much. And interestingly, unlocking an item has very little bearing on being able to use it, as the material costs are massive for some later items. For example, the Mechanical Water Pump costs 5,000 research points (which is absurd as basic items cost 150) but even when you do have it, the material costs are so advanced it work take hours to produce, AND it takes 700w to power it, which is likely 100% more than you have at any given point.

In the interesting innovation space, your beavers get performance bonuses based on a plethora of quality of life features. Variety of food, lodging, and amenities have a compound increase in many aspects of the game. As the game is predicated on being efficient, this is a great incentive to diversify. This is directly weighted against your population numbers too. Plus, the mechanical beaver faction in unlocked when you reach a specific point threshold with the basic faction. That secondary faction has many micro-management options, plus trains.

On that point, logistics are a the true-end game component, and you will quickly learn that vertical stacking of storage is needed to save headaches and that anything you can do to save in “sprawl” will pay large dividends. The game does give tools to create self-sufficient divisions of the map, so you can have an industrial district, a farming one and so on. I found myself pausing the game and trying to build something innovative with platforms, stacks, stairs and so on.

Where this game is still trying to find a footing is specifically in the transportation department. You will continually fight sprawl because of the time lost moving things from one place to the other, which can only be done with beavers. Anytime someone is moving something is time when they are frankly not being productive. If there was a way to improve the amount of items a beaver can carry (notwithstanding trains in the second faction), then we’d be talking!

Realizing that this is a rather critical review of the game, I should point that this is a genre that is predicated on balance of specifics and the ant-farm mentality that ensues. There’s as much joy in setting up as there is in watching it actually work. Timberborn does a LOT really well, more than most games in this genre. It struggles, as many games do, with managing scaling of productivity. It’s certainly worth the price of admission, and your mileage will vary as to how long you stick with it.