In The Business of Cozy - Let Them Trade | PAX East 2025

While in the hustle and bustle of PAX East on Saturday, which was definitely the busiest day of the whole convention, I was excited to be able to sit down and play an incredibly relaxing and comforting city builder.

Let Them Trade is a new game by developer Space Flower. During my time playing, I created a city to generate resources, built up that same city so I could then create a new city on a different block to have the possibility of gathering a new resource. I was then able to connect these new cities together to create a trade route.

I could definitely see myself sinking many hours into setting up multiple trade routes to other cities and homesteads. I discovered that once I had a certain amount of an individual resource, Let Them Trade introduced the ability to unlock new items to make different cities that could run on the resource in that area. For example,  when I started out I had a lodging town to build out lumber, and then I was able to unlock fisheries to work with a city I built close to the ocean tiles.

The style of Let Them Trade is very similar to the tabletop game Settlers of Catan. In both, maps are built out with hexagonal spaces. . This was definitely an inspiration for this city builder because when I zoomed out from the map, I could see that Space Flower had implemented an actual table beneath my game. This gave me the familiar feeling that I was playing this game on the dining room table. I also enjoyed the illustrations of the characters that I quickly met, who also taught me the ropes of the game.

I really enjoyed my time playing Let Them Trade, and I am excited to play more of it when it releases on July 24th. If you are wanting to try the game now, there is a demo available and make sure to wishlist it.