Players 2-4
Length 60-90 mins
Age 10+

More than 100 years ago, within a period of only a few decades, unusually many historical finds, treasures and whole cities of antique cultures were found and excavated; Schliemann discovered Troy, Evans investigated Crete, Carter found the grave of Tutankhamen and Koldewey excavated Babylon.

In Jenseits von Theben the players travel back to this time at the end of the 19th century, take on the role of these famous archaeologists and discover those antique treasures and places, which lay buried in the sands for thousands of years.

The key element to the game is that it is played out over a period of two (or three) years, and each action a player performs takes a certain amount of time -- traveling is a week between cities, gathering knowledge takes time for the level of the knowledge, and actually digging at a cultural site takes time to yield a certain number of artifact tiles. The game uses a novel mechanism to keep track of this. There is a track of 52 spaces around the outside of the board. Each time a player moves and takes an action, he or she moves their player token forward in time. Players take turns based on being the one who is furthest back in "time." So, a player can go to an excavation site and spend 10 weeks digging for artifacts, but that will also mean that the other players will likely be taking several actions in the interim while that player waits for the "time" to catch up.

In addition, the artifact tiles for each civilization are drawn from a bag that also contains dirt. When a player excavates a site, that player pulls tiles from the bag, but some may only be worthless dirt instead of valuable treasure. That dirt is then returned to the bag, making the first draw more likely to provide useful tiles.