Humanity is dead; long live the primates! Having spent literal ages playing second fiddle to their sentient, genetically similar bipedals, the monkey kingdom now has the last laugh. After humanity crumbled and succumbed to undisclosed disaster, the monkeys have taken over the banner as the most important species on earth – after us.
Name: After Us (2023)
Designer: Florian Sirieix
Publisher: Catch Up Games, Geronimo Games
Play type: deck building, card splaying, resource management
What the game is about
Can your primate clan triumph over the Monkey King in a post-apocalyptic, post-human society? In After Us, you are trying to recruit new apes into your clan to gather enough strength, resources and even human relics to vanquish your foes.
Geronimo Games provided me with a review copy of this game in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
How the game works
After Us is a deck-building game where you gather resources to buy new cards for your deck that help you gain more resources and earn you points. The game has you collect four different kinds of resources that are all connected to four different tribes – flowers (mandrills), fruit (orangutan), grains (chimpanzees) and energy (gorillas).
Each turn, you draw a hand of four cards that you display in a certain way to earn resources. Each card has several open and closed frames on up to three different rows. Your goal for each round is to create as many closed frames as possible, activating each frame in reading order. Some frames also offer you resource conversions or points, so it is important to make sure you generate the right resources before you have to spend them, not after.
After you are done collecting resources, you can choose to buy one card. There are weaker and stronger variants of each of the four suits, costing either three or six of their respective resources. Because the game allows for simultaneous play in multiplayer, all of these cards are face-down; you know what you can expect from each type of monkey, but you’re not exactly sure what you are getting.
For example, orangutans give you energy that you can use to power the human artifacts that are randomly flipped over at the start of the game. The mandrills generally are best at scoring points, while the gorillas generate rage. Rage is another resource in the game that does not have a token associated with it, but is tracked on your player board. Rage can be used to remove cards from your deck. As you collect cards in addition to the standard suite of tamarins you start out with, your deck will start to become more powerful based on which interactions you’ve built into it – and how many tamarins you can cull from it.
In the solo mode of After Us, you play against an Automa known as the Monkey King. He collects resources, too; the way that works is that he gains a set amount of resources every round, plus whatever they generate (gaining the bonus you normally get when removing the card using rage in the top right corner). When it comes to your turn, as you generate resources, you take it from their stash first before dipping into the general supply. Based on what they have left, they do or do not buy a card. The tokens you normally (in the multiplayer game, that is) use to determine which suite of cards you’ll be buying from and which additional bonus you’d like are now used to prioritize which monkeys the Monkey King prefers. The goal of the game is to reach 80 points before the Monkey King does.
Theme, setting & narrative
Humans have done the unthinkable and erased themselves from the planet, leaving behind their trinkets and knickknacks for their successors – primates. Seems fitting, doesn’t it, that we evolved from them, failed as a species, and now they are the dominant species yet again? Anyway, how cool After Us‘ theme may be, it is mere window dressing for a deckbuilding game with resource management. It is a race to 80 points, not a quest to build the best tribe of primates. I think the artwork is excellent, though, and it has enough easter eggs and stylistic flourishes that you have something to look at as you play the game.
How does it play?
My first introduction to this game was at Spiel last year, where we played a four-player multiplayer game. Our end conclusion was that this game was probably best fit as a solo game, because there is virtually no interaction. This is partly because of its clever card system that allows for simultaneous play; all decks are facedown, so you’re not hunting for certain cards.
This does create a problem, though; you don’t have a sense of how your deck evolves. Every card does give you a ‘what’d I get?’ endorphin spike, similar to opening Magic booster packs, but that’s because you don’t see the card until after you’ve acquired it. While it helps combat AP in multiplayer games, it does create the feeling of putting a coin in the one-armed bandit and giving it a tug – also during solo play.
Don’t get me wrong, as a big fan of the genre, I like novelties introduced in deckbuilding. But to me, deckbuilding means planning ahead, and acquiring the right cards for your goal. Being unable to go beyond things like ‘I want to get rid of cards so I guess I’ll buy a gorilla’ felt slightly unsatisfactory to me. And what’s more, the cards themselves don’t sport splashy effects or otherwise have any indication of grandeur or power; the better the cards are, in general, the more frames they have, including better exchange rates and/or rewards.
But luckily, that’s not all the game has to offer. While the cards lack individual identity, their combined whole does feel like a coherent engine that you can nudge in certain directions. You might not be able to influence which exact card you get each turn, but you know the ones you got in previous turns, and you are able to attune your needs to that. It’s kind of like deckbuilding in hindsight, where the card you buy this round influences your next purchase, and so on. It can feel really satisfying when all of that comes together, and your engine is humming along the way you need it to.
In the multiplayer game, all phases are gone through simultaneously. When playing against the automated Monkey King opponent, the Monkey King goes first, so you can react to him. This is because the Monkey King gains three of every resource and two batteries, plus resources based on the four cards he flips: the rage value for the basic tamarins, three points for a level 1 monkey, and 6 points for a level 2 (in addition to another effect based on the type of monkey). When you take resources, you take from them first before taking from the reserve; based on what they have left and their priorities (randomly determined by drawing three player tokens at the start of the game), the Monkey King buys a card. Interestingly, this introduces much more interaction in the solo mode than the multiplayer version!
You really need to do that in order to keep the Monkey King in check. After Us‘ solo mode is a tight race where the Monkey King will get ahead and crush you. Momentum and timing are very important, so much so that missing a beat might be the difference between winning and losing. Having one lacklustre hand can really mean you can’t prevent them from buying expensive cards, which means more points down the line. It could even mean that you already know that their next purchase is most likely going to be another level 2 card. There is no comeback, no rubberbanding; once you miss a beat or two, you are most likely losing. The rest of the game isn’t a way for you to redeem yourself – it’s a death row walk.
I do like how the randomly revealed player tokens (and their order) give the Monkey King a unique identity from one game to the next, although I did feel that games where they were going after gorillas (and therefore rage) were significantly harder for me to do well in than games where they had a less steady supply of gorillas.
To reiterate, I do not think the Monkey King is a good solo mode. It is just too much hassle for what it is, and it distracts me from what I want to be doing – unless the goal of the game is to make me feel like a bookkeeping accountant, in which case it succeeded. At the end of the day, I’m left wondering how the solo mode of this game would have looked and played had they stuck to the essence of the multiplayer experience. With less bookkeeping and mechanisms to keep me focused on what I’m doing instead of wondering if I missed a card effect or resource for the Monkey King, I believe After Us could’ve been great instead of just okay.
What you might like
- Deckbuilding feels like building an engine; just because individual cards lack identity doesn’t mean your deck as a whole does
- Some healthy interaction going on, way more than in the multiplayer mode – you can deny the Monkey King resources and steer which cards they want to buy
- Interesting buying decisions – when to spend resources for points, and when to go for card acquisition (and if so, from which stack)
What you might not like
- There is no sense of curating your deck, because the cards you buy are facedown, with no information
- Cards all feel kinda samey because they are all variations of the same formula, but with different frames and exchange rates
- The game versus the Monkey King is super tight, so much so that small mistakes can snowball into a loss quite easily
Conclusion
When played multiplayer, After Us feels like a solo game. However, when played solo, there are a lot of extra rules and bookkeeping for a virtual opponent, which gives the impression that something was lost in translation. It’s strange – solo gamers often desire something that mimics a human opponent, but After Us might have taken it too far. There is an interesting game in here, sure, but it is buried beneath finicky rules and bookkeeping.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Thank you for reading! If you like my content, please consider buying me a coffee or supporting me on Patreon. If this review was helpful to you, tell the publisher!
Stidjen Plays Solo 