After Us Review – A Stunning World With No One In It

Disclaimer: After Us was provided for free by Pandasaurus Games, although the writing and opinions of this article are my own.

Once again humanity has met its undoing, and now the world is ruled by primates. Or at least with your help, it will be. You see, in After Us, you lead a tribe of monkeys. Starting with but a handful of tamarins, you’ll grow your tribe to include orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas and mandrills.

Now before you leave to Google what a mandrill is, just think of Rafiki from The Lion King. Your mandrills won’t be proudly displaying a lion cub for all to see, but they will net you a lot of victory points if you add them to your deck.

In After Us, you’re racing to be the first player to 80 points. At the start of each turn, you’ll draw four monkeys from your deck and place them in a row. These monkeys have three rows of black boxes. Although, most of these boxes are unfinished, and require connection to another monkey card to complete the box.

Once you’re comfortable with your configuration, you’ll run through all three rows of these boxes. The first line is predominately resources. While the second and third lines convert those resources into points and batteries.

Batteries are used to power up some of the most advanced technological marvels left over from the ancient world. So think pinball machines, and minibars, that give you powerful free actions to use.

After everyone has completed their three lines of boxes, and received all of their resources. Then players choose one of the four monkey types to recruit to their tribe, receiving a bonus as they do. Each type has its own strength; chimpanzees give you the ability to copy a completed box, gorillas let you trash cards, orangutangs give you batteries, and mandrills provide you with victory points.

Of course, these monkeys need to be persuaded by fruit, flowers, and seeds to join you. But once this price is paid, then they’re added to the top of your deck to be used next turn.

From then on, it’s just a matter of repeating these steps. Eventually, you’ll earn enough resources to start winning over powerful level-2 monkeys to your tribe. This means you’ll reach 80 points that much sooner.

Taking you to a different world

For such a strong and interesting theme as a real-world Planet of the Apes. The gameplay tastes like watered-down red cordial. Where you want the flavour of the raspberry to fill your mouth, but instead it tastes too much like water – with only a little bit of flavouring.

Replace water in this metaphor with deck-building and you got After Us.

Even though the main mechanic of joining cards together is fascinating, and the mind races at the possibilities of it, in After Us it’s not explored enough. Most of your turns will have an obvious monkey lineup. Even when there isn’t, with a little thought you’ll quickly find the strongest combination.

Either that or it simply won’t matter.

The difference between a good choice, and a bad one, might only be a couple of fruits. You don’t fall drastically behind because of one move, or lose a bunch of resources. Heck, you might not even notice you’ve made a mistake. And because of this, when you look back after finishing a game, you can’t pinpoint why you won, or lost.

Another reason why you struggle to find this cause and effect is that your choice of recruiting monkeys is random. While you choose what type of monkey, you have no idea of what boxes that monkey has and whether or not it synergised with your deck. So sometimes you draw a primate that fits perfectly with the rest of your cards. Other times, you’ll draw Azalea the chain-smoking chimp from North Korea. Not very effective, unless your goal is to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes.

But that’s not all, as After Us lacks player interaction, almost altogether. The only time you communicate with other players through the mechanics of the game is at the end of each round. So while everyone’s activating their boxes, all you see are points trackers moving magically around the scoreboard.

Another downside of this lack of interaction is that everyone was in their own world. As a result, we often fell over each other. With players readying themselves for the next turn, while others were still going through their three rows of boxes.

From another perspective

After Us didn’t do it for me. Its non-interactivity and lack of hard choices left me on my knees begging for more gameplay decisions. But they never came. With that said, everyone else who I played After Us with had a good time.

So being the Curious George that I am, I wanted to understand why.

Well for starters, despite missing the fine-grained control of other deck-builders that I and many others desperately want, After Us ticks every other box required to be a good deck-building game.

You can employ different strategies such as trashing all of your original hand, focusing on big victory points, or going hard on batteries. Then there’s the noticeable ramp-up in power as you play. Especially as you go from level-1 to level-2 monkeys, and from earning 1-2 points per round to 15-20.

Additionally, its lack of interaction can even be welcoming to non-confrontational players and newcomers alike. Everyone’s experienced the frustration of being boxed in during city placement in Settlers of Catan. In After Us, you don’t have to worry about that and just focus on your own game.

Then there’s Vincent Dutrait’s unsurprisingly jaw-dropping art. The colour palette is vibrant and it captures a dilapidated-but-hopeful world brilliantly. I only wish there was more of it.

So it seems all things considered After Us positions itself as a good introduction to modern board games. It’s light on rules and introduces a lot of modern board gaming concepts. Plus it looks great on your table.

More experienced players will find the main mechanic lacking. Without that driving your interest, After Us doesn’t do enough to put itself above other deck-builders we already love.

Finally, there may come a day when I review a Planet of the Apes inspired game and not link the Simpsons. But it is not this day.