Timber Squirrel is a turn-based puzzle game about pushing logs into water to build bridges you can walk across. You play Ratatoskr, the squirrel of Norse myth who runs up and down Yggdrasil carrying messages between the eagle at the crown and the dragon at the roots. In this retelling the world tree has flooded, and the only way to reach the golden acorns — and eventually Idunn herself — is to pay for every gap with timber you shove into the water yourself.
| Thing | What it does | How to live with it |
|---|---|---|
| Open water | Impassable, and it swallows nothing you push into it — logs float there. | Bridge it, then walk on your own timber. |
| Whirlpool | Water that destroys any timber pushed into it. You cannot bridge it at all. | Find another row of the river. There is always a throat. |
| Ember of Surtr | Impassable to the squirrel and it burns logs and rotwood to nothing. | Route your timber around it, never into it. |
| Boulder | Pushable on land, but it refuses to enter water. | Shove it aside before it jams the lane your log needs. |
| Ice | Any push or step continues in a straight line until something stops it. | Line up the shot — a log on ice can fly into a gap far away. |
The one rule that decides most chapters: a log bridge is permanent, a rotwood bridge survives exactly one crossing. The moment Ratatoskr steps off rotwood it sinks and the tile becomes open water again. So a gap you will cross twice — out and back — must be paid for with a log, while a gap you will only ever cross once can be bought with rotwood. Spend them the other way round and you strand yourself in a pocket with no way home; the game will tell you so, and Undo takes it back.
| Act | Chapters | Where you are | What arrives |
|---|---|---|---|
| I · Urðarbrunnr | 1–8 | The Well of Fate | Water, logs, stone |
| II · Elivágar | 9–16 | The Ice Rivers | Rotwood, whirlpools, two-acorn chapters |
| III · Járnviðr | 17–24 | The Iron Wood | Pinecones, rune plates, gates, embers |
| IV · Þrymheimr | 25–30 | Thjazi's Eyrie | Ice, and every earlier hazard at once |
Beyond the thirty chapters, the Endless Climb builds crossings forever — each one wider, meaner and more crowded than the last, and every one checked by a solver before you ever see it so that a climb can never hand you a wood with no way through.
Walk with the arrow keys, W A S D, the on-screen pad or a swipe. Move into a log and Ratatoskr pushes it one tile. Push timber into water and it floats: that tile becomes a plank you can walk on. Bridge every gap between you and the golden acorn, step on the acorn, and the crossing is done.
A log bridge is permanent. A rotwood bridge survives exactly one crossing: the moment you step off it, it sinks and the tile becomes open water again. So a gap you will cross twice — out and back — needs a log, while a gap you will only ever cross once can be paid for with rotwood. Spending them the other way round is the most common way to strand yourself.
It is free and it runs entirely in your browser. There is no download, no install and no account. It plays on desktop with a keyboard and on phones or tablets with touch, and your stars and unlocked chapters are saved locally on your own device.
Four things arrive in order. Act I teaches the water and the stone. Act II adds rotwood and the whirlpools that swallow anything you push into them. Act III adds rune plates and gates, which only open once every plate carries a pinecone, plus the embers of Surtr that burn timber to nothing. Act IV adds ice, which carries you further than you meant to go. From chapter twelve there are also chapters with more than one acorn to collect.
Stars are based on how many moves you spent against the best possible route. Three stars means you matched the optimal number of moves exactly, two stars means you finished within about a third more, and one star means you got there the long way. Undo rewinds a move and gives it back, so a careful player can always reach three stars.
The Endless Climb generates crossings forever, each one harder than the last: wider rivers, more whirlpools, more ice. Every crossing comes with a step budget, and every step you save is added to your score. Thirty chapters of hand-made story finish at Thjazi's Eyrie, but the climb never does.
Timber Squirrel is a single-page HTML5 game with no engine, no framework, no external assets and no network calls. The board, the squirrel, the water, the ice and every sound are generated at runtime from code — the only thing that is not is the cover image. Chapter par values are not hand-tuned: a breadth-first search over the full game state proves each crossing solvable and returns the exact minimum number of moves, and the same solver powers the Hint button and the deadlock warning you get if a route can no longer reach the acorn.