Let Them Trade

My spreadsheet brain spent the first hour of Let Them Trade quietly impressed. The core proposition is genuinely different from the genre default: you are not a panicked mayor putting out hunger fires or scrambling against a disaster clock. You place cities, connect them with roads, assign production buildings to the hex tiles that actually support them (forests for woodcutters, lakes for fishing huts, mountains for stone quarries), and then you step back and watch an autonomous economic machine run. Cities buy from and sell to each other according to their own needs and wealth levels - a poor fishing village wants wood, a richer settlement up the mountain demands processed wool goods - and your tax income flows directly from the volume and value of that inter-city commerce. That indirect-control philosophy is the thing that makes Let Them Trade feel distinct, and it works. The progression loop layers on satisfying complexity gradually. Peasants level up into workers, workers into citizens, and eventually your cities can house aristocrats, with each tier unlocking more demanding supply chains and more profitable trade. The research tree, accessed through a central research centre, is where you unlock new building types - bakeries, forges, more advanced housing - and upgrade existing ones for better output or throughput. Tax management adds a secondary decision layer: you can collect levies from individual cities on a cooldown and redistribute gold to weaker towns that need a growth injection. It is not Paradox-tier economic simulation, but there are real decisions to make about where to invest, which city to prioritise, and how to balance hex-slot scarcity as your settlements grow. The limited number of tile slots per city level is the main spatial constraint that forces genuine trade-offs, and it is the most interesting pressure the game applies. The tutorial is one of the better ones in the genre. It uses short visual clips rather than walls of text, and the campaign's ten scenarios function as a structured extension of that teaching, introducing bandits, bridge logistics, and advanced supply chains at a measured pace. The bandit system itself is deliberately light - knights and watchtowers handle raids without demanding any real tactical input. You send a knight, you upgrade the barracks when threats escalate mid-to-late game, and you move on. That is the correct design call for this game's tone, even if it means the "threat" layer never creates genuine tension. A free sandbox mode and a Steam Workshop-connected map editor round out the content, giving chain-optimisers a longer runway once the campaign wraps. Here is where I have to be straight with genre veterans: the depth ceiling arrives sooner than the setup suggests. Experienced builders will clock the full campaign and hit a noticeable content wall inside twenty hours. Map variation is limited - tile types matter less than raw empty space for placing buildings, which undercuts the promise of meaningfully different playthroughs. The UI lacks a proper kingdom-wide resource overview, forcing you to click through individual cities to diagnose bottlenecks, which becomes genuinely irritating at scale. And the build order, for all its apparent flexibility, is more linear in practice than it feels at first. Critics are right that the trading mechanics, which are the most promising thing here, are underutilised relative to the game's potential. For a strategy newcomer or someone who wants a weekend palette cleanser between heavier titles, this hits the target precisely. The board-game-on-a-living-room-table visual presentation is consistently charming, performance is solid even on busy maps, and the campaign's gentle difficulty ramp is genuinely newcomer-friendly without being condescending. Veterans should probably wait for post-launch updates to flesh out the late-game before committing. The foundation is good enough that more content would make it considerably more compelling.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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