Auf Spurensuche am Limes

"Auf Spurensuche am Limes" is a board game with an accompanying book with 48 pages of background information.

The game board shows a excavation site with zones of different depth. At the start of the game, findings and discoveries (tiles connected to one colour) are distributed on the site, face up. In a next step, all findings are covered with the dust of time - terrain tiles on top of them, thus creating multiple layers of tiles. Only after this, colours are assigned to the players - hopefully thy remember some of "their" findings.

Each player plays a team of archaeologists trying to excavate in particular those findings which match his own research assignment (colour). In trying to achieve that, however, fragments of roman documents might be discovered, earning the player additional points.

At a player's turn, he performs each of 4 actions:

• Move his expedition manager 1 - 3 spaces around the border of the site (to more promising sectors). His position determines the spaces of the site which can be reached by archeologists (neutral colour).
• Now the player has 5 movement points to move one or more neutral archeologists, either to the sector determined by his own expedition manager or to some bad position for the opponents.
• The 3rd action the site is explored. Two terrain tiles with archeologists on them are lifted and the things nderneath are now visible. They are (mostly) not directly available.
• Finally, the player can perform an excavation. To get the several findings visible, you need to place one or more archeologists around the space, depending on the depth of the zone.

Findings of your own colour are directly put into the museum, more worthy findings are replacing ones with lesser value. Findings of an opponent`s colour are not that easily excavated. You need allocated points or some dice luck to get them.

Since mostly a finding is not discovered and excavated in the same turn, players have to be careful not to discover findings, which can be easily "grabbed" by their opponents.

The game ends when one player manages to excavate all of his assigned findings (winner of the game). If nobody manages to do so, the game ends, when a player reaches the end of the "expedition track", where successful excavations and discoveries are registered, and the player with the most allocated points wins the game.

The advanced game offers fences to make it harder for opponents to excavates findings discovered by other players.