Let Them Tradeis a simple, relaxing, board-gameified take on an economy sim. Featuring a short campaign to teach you the game’s mechanics, you’re let loose into a small set of pre-fabricated maps or a community-powered map builder tool and challenged to build a functioning, multi-city trade economy, where goods are collected, traded, and taxed for your profit. Though the game is very honest in its advertising, never claiming to be more than a cozy, carefree game to play on a relaxed afternoon, its lack of depth can still feel a little disappointing. While the game itself is not a letdown, a little more meat on these bones would have greatly elevated the experience.
On the surface,Let Them Trademight appear to the unaware viewer to be a 4X game in the vein ofCivilizationorHumankind. While the game does make use of “cities” and a hexagonal grid, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Instead,Let Them Tradeis a little grid-based board game where the goal is to achieve certain mission objectives by facilitating trade.
The best way to explainLet Them Tradeis to walk you through the game’s basic mechanics: as the king, you store a certain number of goods in your castle. By building another city, you can dedicate a section of the map to producing goods, such as potatoes, wood, or more complex materials down the line. These cities operate independently and have their own needs in order to maintain the happiness of their population. Think of a lightweight version of theAnnofranchise’s mechanics, in a sense.
The main use of these cities, besides producing resources, is trade: in order to earn tax money and keep your cities functioning properly, you want each city to trade with the next. Ideally, a city producing potatoes would take those spuds to a city that produces wood, sell them, then buy wood and take it back to the city of origin. This goes on forever as you get access to more complex goods, and the perfect symbiosis of city trade happens when each city is facilitating trade with the rest, maintaining a strong economy by selling their own goods without any one city having a total monopoly on goods.
What I have just explained is essentially the entire loop ofLet Them Trade. There are smaller mechanics, such as researching more complex buildings and scouting the map, that play a smaller role in the gameplay, but essentially, everything you need to understand about the game is that you’re trying to make cities trade.
The game delivers on its promise: it is a cozy, short, relaxed game with very low stakes and lots of freedom for the player. Its most pressing or dangerous mechanic, bandit raids, is easily dealt with and low stakes to the point of being more of a nuisance than anything else. Thankfully, this feature can be turned off.
My issues withLet Them Tradeboil down to a lack of content and an over-boardgamification of the economy.
Though the game wants to be short and sweet, the shortness can cut in on the sweetness pretty easily. If you are especially invested in the game’s economy simulation, you will quickly hit a “that’s it?” wall when you reach the extent of the game’s complexity. Essentially, once you learn the game’s principal mechanics, there won’t be a point at which you feel challenged or pressed to innovate or advance; things kind of just grow in scale and remain pretty manageable throughout.
Beyond the game’s short research tree, the main form of progression or completion is a series of missions that come up as you play the game: goals such as “build aristocrat houses” or “produce x amount of some resource.” Really, the game feels less like an interesting trade simulator and more like a board game, where you keep trying to meet certain objectives until you personally feel done with the game. This isn’t exactly something the game wants to keep secret from you, either, from the small, wooden board perspective of your kingdom to an actual box for the alleged board game itself sitting just off-screen.
Let Them Tradeis not a bad game, by any measure of the word, nor is it false advertising; you get exactly what’s described. Regardless, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by what the game had to offer, like it could have been more with a bit more complexity, and that said complexity would not have taken away from the game’s cozy vibe, either.
If the game interests you, definitely check it out. However, be sure you know exactly what you’re getting into before you pick this title up: a complex economy simulator this is not, and its lax nature might put even the most relaxed of gamers to sleep.
The Final Word
Let Them Tradeis a relaxing, no-pressure title that delivers on its promise of simplicity but falls short when it comes to long-term engagement. Though it doesn’t want to be, this game could really shine if it were more complex, focusing more on its trading mechanics than its charming vibe. With plenty of room for updates, this is a title I would keep an eye on if you aren’t already sold on it.
Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review ofLet Them Trade. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on ourGame Reviewspage!Let Them Tradeis available onSteam.
