Timberborn is a city-building game for beavers in a post-apocalyptic world. Your colony of beavers find some water and grass and decide to build a settlement and its your job to guide them through survival, expansion and building a thriving society.
I originally tried its demo back in the day when it was in early access and picked it properly up after its 1.0 release in spring of 2026.
The gameplay loop is built around “cycles” that consist of phases of good times when waters flow and everything flourishes and bad times that can include things like drought and badwater floods. The game gets progressively more difficult as time goes on as the bad times become longer and rougher. You need to build your beaver society in a way that can handle these times.
Not the most beginner friendly game
I’ve played my fair share of city and society builders over the past 30 years and even still, Timberborn had quite a learning curve in the beginning. It does have a tutorial but it would benefit from a bit more love.
Right out of the gate, you have this massive toolbar with so many things you can build — in the future. I found it challenging in the beginning, especially with the tutorial enabled, to navigate and figure out what I need to work on.
The tutorial gives you the few first steps but doesn’t quite explain any of them. It tells you to build a building A and then building B but I found there was very little instructions to help the player understand the mechanics and strategies of building a thriving colony.
A good example of this is the drought that is a key challenge mechanic in the game. What does the tutorial teach us about it? When it’s approaching: nothing; once it’s gone: it says you survived it but that there would be more.
You pick up these things after a couple of failed playthroughs and that’s a perfectly valid way to teach players too. The existence of the tutorial feels like there could be more there.
Game Maker’s Toolkit has a great video about tutorials that I’ve written about in Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games.
I still don’t quite understand a lot of the mechanics or what are good strategies but every time I learn something new and hopefully improve on a pace that keeps the game interesting for a long time to come.
On the other hand, the game is not a difficult game in the sense that your runs constantly fail. It’s a sandbox city builder and while it does provide challenge especially early on for a newcomer, once you figure out how to survive some of the early problems, you get to enjoy a chill and relax citybuilder. And a great one at that.