How to play Run a Christmas Tree Lot

The developer describes four moves, and they are a cycle rather than a checklist: order and stock different types of Christmas trees, sell trees to customers for cash, hire workers to help run the business, and expand and upgrade the lot. Each turn of the cycle should leave you with more capacity than the last.

1. Redeem the codes before anything else. The working list pays out far more starting cash than the game gives you, and it costs one minute in the menu. The codes page has the list and the order to type them in.
2. Walk the empty lot before you place anything. Find where customers arrive and where the supplier truck lands. Those two points define the whole floor plan.
3. Put the counter down next. Central, at the end of the walk from the entrance — the layout guide explains why the counter is the first object and not the last.
4. Order trees and stock two rows. Two rows, not one pile: several customers browse at once, and you find out quickly whether your counter is in the right place.
5. Serve the first wave yourself. You learn the timing — how long a customer takes, how often stock runs out — only by standing at the counter.

Cash is profit per tree sold. It is the pacing resource: stock costs cash, rows cost cash, expansion costs cash. Reputation is different — the developer ties it to customers being happy, and the 2x Reputation pass describes growing “your lot’s name” rather than your bank balance.

That split matters because it gives you two separate reasons a customer leaves. A customer who cannot find a tree leaves with cash you never earned. A customer who waits too long or gets a bad experience leaves with the reputation you never grew — and the VIP pass description says happy reviews come from customers who are served well, which is why service quality is not just flavour text.

Practically: if your problem is that you cannot afford the next row, you are short of cash and need sales. If your problem is that the lot feels stuck at the same size no matter how much you sell, look at reputation and at how long customers are waiting.

Hire when serving is the bottleneck, not when you are bored. The test is simple: count the customers waiting while you are doing something else — restocking, ordering, or placing a decoration. If that number grows during a session, a worker converts that lost queue into cash. If the queue is empty, a worker is a wage with nothing to do.

Give a new worker a short walk: station them between the tree rows and the supplier drop, so they can restock without crossing the customer path. The worker strip in the layout guide is the placement this comes from.

Expand when both rows are full and customers still queue. Expanding before that means buying floor space you cannot fill, and stock you cannot afford to display. Expanding after that means turning away customers in a lot that has room to grow.

Grow in one direction and keep an empty row slot in reserve. Every expansion that has to demolish something is two purchases instead of one — a rule that costs nothing to follow on day one and a lot of cash to fix on day thirty.

• Codes redeemed, cash in hand before the first sale.
• Rows stocked to the front, back of the display loaded as reserve.
• One clear lane in front of the counter, even at peak.
• Workers on the staff side, never in the customer lane.
• Cash spent on rows first, decoration last.
• One empty row slot left for the next expansion.