The Beta PawBorough Experience

In 2022, one of my friends told me about a Kickstarter for a then-upcoming, browser-based game called PawBorough. The pitch was basically "Flight Rising, but with cats", I was immediately hooked!

The gameplay centers around managing a clan of cats living in a fantastical setting. You can craft items, go on combat missions, dress up your cats, and breed your cats together to make even more cats! The art and game mechanics are heavily inspired by the Warrior Cats book series, with many of artists working on the game being former Warriors fanartists. I used to play Flight Rising (along with a handful of other animal-based browser games) quite a bit, and I had a huge Warrior Cat phase when I was a teen. This is really just a dream combination for me.

Obviously, I supported the Kickstarter. One of my backer rewards was an access code that let me make an account while the site is still in closed beta testing. Technically, I was a little late to the party. I rarely ever check the email that my reward code was sent to, so by the time I made my account some users had already been there for months.

I'm also at a slight disadvantage because I'm believe most of the beta testers are communicating through the official PawBorough Discord server. I completely refuse to use Discord unless I absolutely have to, but that's a rant for another day. My point is that the on-site forums and help center aren't as active as I'd like them to be, because people are probably just using the Discord instead to get updates about the game and interact with other players.

My First Clan and Account Resets

The game devs made it very clear from the beginning that there'd be multiple stages of development and peoples accounts would more or less be reset before each of them, so beta testers shouldn't get too attached to their cats and items. In-game items given as backer rewards can be redeemed multiple times, once per each stage of development.

I started playing the game in march of 2025, played the game for a couple months, then lost interest for another few months, only to randomly remember and log back into the game the other day. When I logged back in I saw that my account had been reset, but I honestly wasn't upset about it.

When I first started playing the game for the first time I was more concerned with just messing around with all the features and figuring out how they work. I didn't become super attached to any of my cats or bother giving them much "lore". I think a lot of the fun with these kinds of games is the roleplaying element, so I was honestly kind of relieved to be given a second chance.

I think I still have a few screenshots of some of my old cats somewhere, but honestly I don't think people would be that interested.

Meet Misfitclan

Okay so, on to my new and improved clan, Misfitclan!

For this playthrough I chose Abyssal as my Borough. Boroughs are the different sections of the map with their own geography and cultures. Gameplay-wise, they don't do much, all they do is give your cat a certain eye color (cats from Abyssal always have pink and/or purple eyes), but they give you a great jumping off point for roleplaying! Since Abyssal cats are described as being sea-faring explorers, I've been thinking of my clan as being kind of like a pirate crew. The details are still foggy though.

When you start the game you have to create your “founders”, which are two cats that you get to customize! Except for the cats sex, for some reason. Since my first playthrough's founders were one male and one female, I assumed that founders would always be a male and a female, to insure that the player has at least one pair for the games breeding mechanics. I guess I was wrong.

That's still not gonna stop me from shipping my founders together, though! They're lesbian lovers in my mind. I guess the tomcats will just have to be sperm donors. Or maybe all of the cats are just in one big polycule. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, Tigerstripe (yes, I'm sticking to Warrior Cat naming conventions) is a big, strong doofus! Like if a himbo was a butch lesbian and also a cat. She's the leader/captain of the clan and does most of the physical labor. She's very caring and means well, but can be very oblivious at times.

Her girlfriend Melonleaf is very much the opposite, overly cautious and stuck in their own head. They're also the clans deputy/first mate. I don't know what the "scholar" role actually does in-game, but I feel like most leaders have some kind of consultant, and "scholar" sounded like it'd be the closest thing to that.

The rest of your clan is randomly generated for you. You have the option to reroll for a set of different random cats, but you can't edit them, or go back to previous cats you generated. These are the cats that I eventually settled on.

The story in my head so far is that all of my cats are outcasts in some way, and were lucky enough to find each other, hence the name "Misfitclan". Since Clouddrop and Sweetwhisker are from different Boroughs, maybe they were exiled from their original clans and somehow ended up in Abyssal territory? A lot of story potential there.

Eventually, I adopted a bunch more cats from another player. I didn't really bother giving them lore or anything, but that may change in the future. Their main job is to help with territory ground duties. The more cats you have to help you out, the better!

The Guild

Right now, the main way of unlocking new items is via guild missions. Every cat has stats and completing more successful missions levels them up. Each mission has it's own difficulty. The more difficult missions you do, the rarer the items you get.

You have the option to start your own guild or join another players. During my first playthrough, the game glitched whenever I tried to make my own guild and seemingly forced me to join another player's. This time it's doing the opposite.

I like PawBorough's combat system a lot, a lot more than Flight Rising's at least! Flight Rising has a Pokémon-like type system, which can get very tedious after a while. Once you know which type is strongest against another, you just spam the same attack over and over. PawBorough seems to be going for a more Fire Emblem-style, strategy RPG type of combat.

I also like how combat stats affect things outside of guild quests. For example, having a higher strength stat makes a cat better at getting certain items in other parts of the game. It makes everything feel more connected.

Recently, the dev have added objects to the guild mission maps: rocks that block your path, thorns that hurt you, and hay that gives you a stat boost.

Since the game is still in beta, the game has a lot of glitches and oversights, but I imagine these will improve as development goes on. I'm not sure if this is actually a glitch or if I just have really bad luck, but for about 1 of out 4 maps that generate for me my cat will just spawn inside a wall of rocks and be unable to move. All I can do is skip my turn several times, wait for the enemy to get close enough to me (enemies ignore all objects), and hope I can kill it by just spamming my attack over and over. I usually beat these fights, but they're still really annoying.

Genetics and Breeding

A big draw of these animal games to me is the breeding mechanics. Put two weird looking animals together and see what they make! Right now it's not as exciting, because all of my cats are pretty basic, and a lot of the more fantastical features are still in development.

Pelt colors work similarly to how they do in Flight Rising. Each cat has a set of color genes. When two cats are breed together, the game finds the shortest path between the parents genes on the color wheel, and the kittens can have any color in that section of the wheel.

I don't fully understand how kittens inherit other traits, like pelt patterns or accents, yet. I think some traits might be rarer than others and given different probability weights, but I'm not 100% sure. Even if I was, the devs could always change it, since it's so early in development. I think eye pattern and eye palette (not to be confused with eye color, which is determined by the borough the cat is born into), might just be totally random.

Something cool about PawBorough is that cats have multiple accent colors and accent genes can be applied to either of them. It gives you more options for breeding and customization, which is always a plus! It also means that if you breed a kitten with an accent color you don't like, you can always try the other one instead.

Other Random Observations

Farming

The devs have added some highly anticipated features in the latest reset. You can now raise livestock and tend to crops, which leads to new items and recipes that were previously unobtainable and gives purpose to the farmer role.

Withering

Certain items can now wither away if unused for too long. I imagine that most people find this annoying, but I actually think this is a good addition. In a lot of browser games I've played, richer players just hoard items, even common items, to exploit the game's economy. I also think it encourages players to actually use their items and explore the different recipes and mechanics.

Items that wither away become scraps or ash, which can be used for the farming and animal husbandry mechanics.

Daily and Hourly Activities

The game also now has a task system. There are both daily and hourly tasks and the game rewards you for keeping up a multi-day streak. I like this a lot! It keeps me from getting bored with the game and gives me a reason to check out features that I might have ignored otherwise. Not to mention the accompanying artwork is very cute!

Gender and Pronoun Options

You can set custom pronouns for your cats! If your cat uses multiple pronoun sets, you can set how frequently each set is used.

The cats sex is used solely for the breeding mechanic. Cats of any sex can use any pronouns, wear any accessories, and take on any role. Male and female cats have different poses in their portraits by default, but you can freely switch between the two poses. This isn't a big deal right now, but upcoming breeds of cats show sexually dimorphic features in their poses. It'll be cool to see people make their cats trans or gender non-conforming.

Some game and fan materials don't even refer to the cats as male or female. The PawBorough Wiki refers to the different cats as "mars cats" and "venus cats", referring to the symbols on their profiles.

CSS Customization

For some reason all profile editing seems to be disabled for me now, but before it was disabled I played around with the custom CSS boxes you could put on your profile and you could do quite a lot with them.

Basically everything you could do in normal CSS you could do in these. They even responded to media query, so you can set light and dark modes on them. The only things I struggled with were custom fonts and anchor links, but I kind of expected that. The site also allows for separate mobile and desktop widgets, so those who don't know how to make responsive layouts can still make decent, readable boxes.

Dens

If I could make one small critique. Devs, please add a next/previous button to dens 🙏 It's really tedious having to click on a cat, do whatever you have to do, go back to it's den, scroll to find the next cat, rinse and repeat. Especially since so many things are done through the individual cat menus.

F2U 86x15 Buttons

Since you bothered reading this far, here's a little treat! I made and shared these buttons on the site's forums, but old forum posts seem to have been deleted during the last site reset. I'll probably make a separate page for all my free graphics eventually, but for now I'll just dump them here.

They're inspired by similar buttons that people use on their forum signatures and profiles on Flight Rising. Colors were taken from templates on idbuttons.neocities.org, but the pixel icons were hand-sprited by me!

Credit/linking back is heavily appreciated, but I won't make a big fuss if you don't, just don't claim as your own. Also, no hotlinking, please!