Let Them Trade

Summary:
Excellent Game. A small city builder / economic simulation with a board game feel.

Graphics: Cute - wooden toy style.

Mechanics:
Interesting if you are into production chain games. The mechanics (incl the self adjusting market prices) are deeper than it appears at first glance.

There is a bit of a puzzle element here as you have limited number of towns each of which having limited slots for production buildings.

There is a minimalist combat element where you defend against NPC thieves that can intercept your traders and steal your goods. But this is more of an annoyance and adds little to the gameplay. Probably meant to keep you busy while you are waiting for some required resources to accumulate.

Replayability:
Medium. After the campaign/tutorial (which is well done) you can play on several different maps in a sandbox mode. The winter update introduces a slightly more challenging map. User created maps can also be downloaded.

Variety comes from the fact that you need to adjust your town layouts (i.e. which production buildings go into the limited slots of each town) based on the resource distribution available, Since each map needs to be explored first you don't have upfront knowledge of the resource locations when you start planning which adds more challenge.

However - in sandbox mode your goal is always to get to the highest tier of citizens and then run the "party tent" successfully (Have lots of high end goods) . So that is a bit repetitive after a while.

Price: I feel fair for the amount of content provided. Good for 30-50 hrs. Then you have seen it.

Okay, okay, get this: They trade, and you let them.
In short, it's a casual strategy game with all of the pieces present. Since the best way to combat low potato prices is to cause a brief tiny little famine, it's even got the Geneva Checklist aspect of any good strategy game covered!
Why I'd pick this up:
The game succeeds at its goal of turning the traditional production model on its head. Underproduction is bad, but low tax revenue is worse!
It's calm and slow-paced with no real way to lose, but includes speedup to combat waiting times.
The art style is cute and consistently executed.
Why I may wait for a sale:
Game's not awfully long, though I think any longer would overstay its welcome. You'll have your 12-20 hours of fun.
The campaign makes you redo most of the tech tree in each mission. I like redoing the setup because each map is different and you'll have a better forward plan with experience, but having to build a grain farm, wait for enough grain to research a mill, build it, then wait for enough flour to research a bakery, and finally build that gets a little grating when most intermediate products have little to no use outside of their production chain.
There are some rough edges. The city AI feels a bit dumb or outright broken sometimes, refusing to tend to basic needs when we vastly overproduce fish, for instance. Multiple times, bandits popped into existence IN FRONT OF MY CASTLE. You'd think we would've seen them! Certain modifications (Lumberjack Guild, potato farm shared fields) are not correctly reflected in the production graphs.

Fun game but campaign is a little short and free play is not interesting enough to play for verry long

Very fun 20ish hour campaign worth every penny. Nice concise little game in the style of a simplified Anno-type game with different tiers of citizenry that require different goods. I'm not sure that there will be much replayability past one sandbox game after the campaign as there isn't a whole lot to do or variability to add complexity but for the price of this game it was a really fun way to spend a weekend!

It's easy to figure out and start playing. With quite a bit of prior experience with sim/trading games I was able to max everything out fairly quickly and earn the achievements. My son is nine years old and has never played a game like this before but he is enjoying it quite a lot, he loves hunting down bandits! We plan on making custom maps to challenge each other once he finishes the campaign.

I think the game is pretty low on replayability (due to a lack of content), is remarkably poorly optimized, and I generally don't agree with how the economy is structured. Your townsfolk generate "taxes" out of thin air, which is used by the towns to purchase goods from other towns. It would be way cooler if your castle had a bigger role in the economy aside from purely being consumptive. Like printing money.

BUT, the game is overall a very fun experience, and I think it's worth its current price. It also seems to be regularly updated, so I expect my review to be grossly outdated in a year.

Another game to add to the "meh" category - its good, not great - get on sale.