10:30 pm: Kids are in bed. Timberborn is on sale. Let's give this thing a whirl finally.

7:30 am: Wife is asking me why I am still up. I try to explain to her that my new maple farm finally matured and my beavers can now finally finish my super dam. With it they will achieve the largest reservoir of water ever witnessed by beaverkind. She doesn't understand why the ever present danger of droughts fading into the annals of beaver history is so significant. She wordlessly hands me a very awake baby and walks away to start her work day.

Joking aside, although that story is based on actual events, this game is pretty fun. It's a harsh environment colony builder like many others. It isn't as ruthless as some, Banished comes to mind, that can see your colony come to ruin quite quickly due to fairly easy to make oversights on your part. Oh, don't get me wrong. You can accidentally kill your beavers. It is easy to starve them to death. Early on it'll be due to mismanaging the most important resource of the game, water. Later on when you have a thriving beaver metropolis, it'll be because you ran out of water.

Yes, both times the problem was water. The problem will always be water. Well, sometimes the problem is there aren't enough logs if you had every log in the universe; But mostly, it's water.

When you are new catastrophe will probably come from mismanaging your rivers. Late game it'll be because you struggle to hold enough water to survive the ever more severe droughts.

But water my friends. Water! That is what makes this game so much fun. Your beavers actually manage your resources pretty well on their own once you've got them set up. Where you, ever present godlike figure in the sky, come in is planning out how to extract every ounce of value you can from that precious blue stuff flowing by in the river. Your oh so cuddly civilization consists of an army of super cute beavers! And beavers like to build dams. So build dams you will. Build dams you must.

You will use epic tons of lumber to channel and shape the flow of the water. Build large reservoirs that you can release bit by bit as your beavers drink up their little stream during a long drought. Build dams to create beaver made waterfalls that increase the speed of the current. Force that water into a tighter channel to create even more water speed. Then build water wheels to milk that fast flowing water for power to run your industry.

Oh, did I mention that you are raising freaking beavers! They are so freaking adorable.