Timberborn is a beaver city-building game with a unique architecture system, wooden machinery, dams and water physics.
Timberborn is all about beavers, and its lumberpunk setting works well with that. To survive in the dry wasteland, your beaver colony redirects rivers with dams and floodgates, terraforms, and cuts trees to build sophisticated machinery and vertical cities. At the same time, we can go wild with post-apocalyptic elements like dynamite or beaver breeding pods.
– says Bartlomiej Dawidow, lead designer at Mechanistry.
By labelling the game an examples of “lumberpunk” (supported e.g. by the title), Timberborn taps into the current trend of differentiate -punk movements, communicating topicality and a larger world view than just one game.
The two beaver factions, the nature-friendly Folktails or the industrious Iron Teeth, mimic the distinction between progressive and conservative framings.
The focus on water physics and wet/dry seasons emphasizes the aspect of seasonality or seasonal temporarility (cf. circular (eco-)narratives).