Setting up trade routes is gaming catnip to me, so I'm pouncing on this beautiful city builder on Steam that has some strong Catan vibes

I don't know exactly why, but the idea of setting up trade routes is like catnip to me. Little horse-drawn wagons? Shipments of lumber or wool or vegetables? Resources trundling between cities? Yeah, I'll play a game where that happens.

Let Them Trade, as you can probably guess from the title, is all about that trading life. You build little medieval cities on a beautiful map, assign them specialties like farming, fishing, or woodcutting, link them together through roads and bridges, and set up trade networks so that resources can get from the places they're produced to where they're needed most.

And speaking of catnip, you can even see a cozy kitty dozing in the background while you play because Let Them Trade takes place on top of a virtual dining room table—just like a game of Catan might.

Spaceflower, the developer of Let Them Trade, wants to make a few things clear before you dive in: this isn't a large-scale, time-consuming strategy game that sprawls across different eras, and it's not a punishment simulator about perfectly minmaxxing your trade routes. It's all pretty chill and casual, not a game where your entire town of peasants starves because a shipment of taters didn't reach them in time.

I started my own little trading empire by building one farming city on the grasslands, another in the woods, and one more near the ocean. Soon I had shipments of potatoes, wood, and fish crisscrossing the map, and as the King overseeing it all, I received a sweet 25% of every trade. Once the basics of supply and demand are covered, you can start researching and creating luxury goods to make your citizens happier (and tax the heck out of them to make yourself richer). And there's more to be discovered on the far edges of the map, so sending out scouts to explore reveals new resource nodes to exploit with additional cities.

But with the accumulation of wealth comes a threat: itty bitty bandits will start raiding your most successful cities and making off with your hard-earned potatoes, so keep a close eye out and send knights out from your castle to deal with them.

So far I'm digging the chill vibes and tabletop feel of Let Them Trade, and there's a couple ways to play: a campaign mode will challenge you with quests, or you can build exactly how you want in sandbox mode. You'll find Let Them Trade on Steam.