Lessons Hansa is designed to teach three conceptual lessons, two specific and one general. One specific lesson is the principle of comparative advantage. An intelligent player should rapidly discover that it sometimes pays to ship a good from one city to another even though the labor cost of producing the good is less in the city it is shipped to. In this case as in that, the correct answer is one for which marginal product is proportional to price. The general lesson is that military conquest is not the only model for interaction or expansion.
Mutual advantage is an alternative model that is at least as interesting and important.
In addition to teaching these conceptual lessons, Hansa is also designed to give the player some feel for the implications of pre-modern transportation technology. Relative costs of transport are loosely based on historical figures. After playing for a while, players should begin to realize that two coastal cities far apart are, in terms of transport costs, closer than either is to a city a short distance inland. Similarly, they should begin to appreciate the importance of rivers for defining trade routes. Limitations of the current version Hansa v 0.6 is a playable game, but one that lacks some of the features intended for the final version.