Hansa Tradelines is a route and pattern building game in which players take the roles of merchant citizens of a city part of the old European Hansa league.
It allows many simple and complex play modalities, but in the basic one players have to build their routes and connect their cities to a single starting city which is placed in the middle of the table. In their turn, players have to decide wether to place a route-tile, which is taken from a common face-down tile pile, or a city-tile, which is taken from the players own limited city-tile reserve. Players have to decide the best position for each of their tiles so that they ensure their own connections and prevent other players from doing so in order to achieve victory, which is based on a pointing system related to the geometric connectivity of a hexagon.