Review: After Us

Introduction & Overview

2083. Humanity has been extinct for several decades. As the world returns to its origins, primates continue to evolve. They form tribes and learn to use the objects humans left behind. As the leader of one of these tribes, it is your responsibility to guide the primates on the path to collective wisdom.

This is the premise of After Us, a design by Florian Sirieix (Imaginarium, The A.R.T. Project). First published in 2023 by Catch Up Games in an English edition. Vincent Dutrait (Lewis & Clark, Jaipur, The Quest for El Dorado) is in charge of the artwork.

It is published in Spanish by Maldito Games (although the game is completely language-independent). It supports 1 to 6 players, with a recommended minimum age of 12, and an approximate running time of 40 to 60 minutes. The MSRP is €45. For this review, we used a review copy of the Spanish edition kindly provided by Maldito Games.

Important: if you already know the game and/or are only interested in my opinion about it, you can go directly to the Opinion section. The Content and Mechanics sections are especially intended for those who do not know the game and prefer to get a general idea of how it works.

Components

Inside a two-piece cardboard box (lid and bottom), measuring 31.6×22.4×6 cm (a rectangular box slightly longer than that of Root or Pax Pamir), we find the following components:

Main Board (cardboard)
6 Player Boards (cardboard)
120 Food Tokens (40 of each type) (wooden)
12 Markers (2 of each color) (wooden)
24 Action Discs (6 of each type) (cardboard)
174 Cards (62.5×88 mm):
- 48 Starting Primate Cards
- 120 Primate Cards
- 6 Player Aids
47 Energy Tokens (cardboard)
7 Object Tiles (cardboard)
Rulebook

How to Play

After Us is a light-medium weight game in which each player manages a deck of primates following a cataclysm that wiped out humankind. These cards feature symbols (complete or incomplete) across three rows. Each turn, players draw 4 cards from their deck and, simultaneously, align them side by side to complete the frames. Once all players have arranged their cards, they resolve the completed frames from left to right and top to bottom. These frames allow players to collect resources and exchange them for points or other benefits. Once all players have resolved their cards, each chooses an action that provides an immediate benefit and allows access to a specific type of primate, paying 3 or 6 resources of the matching type to acquire a new card, which is placed on top of their draw deck. Additionally, players can spend resources to mimic the action chosen by an adjacent rival. The game ends when a player reaches or exceeds 80 points, and the player with the most points wins.

Key Concepts

Let’s start with the Resources. Throughout the game, players will gather units of three types of food (blue flowers, orange fruits, and black seeds) as well as batteries. Food is primarily used to attract new primates to the tribe, though it is also spent on conversion effects or activating additional bonuses. Batteries, rather than being used to attract primates, power human technological items.

The core engine of the game is deck-building combined with hand management. Each player starts with a starting deck of tamarins. The card anatomy is identical for all primates: three rows at the bottom featuring frames that may or may not be complete. Inside these frames are effects (resource gathering on the top row, victory points on the second row, and various special effects on the third row). The goal is to connect these cards horizontally to complete the frames and trigger their abilities. These abilities resolve from left to right and top to bottom. The top right corner shows the reward gained when trashing the card from your deck.

Players can attract new primates during a dedicated phase in each round. There are four species, each focusing on a specific element. Baboons (blue) provide victory points, orangutans (orange) provide batteries, gorillas (black) generate rage, and chimpanzees (beige) grant copy effects. In turn, cards come in two levels, with level II cards costing more but offering significantly stronger effects.

Another key element for attracting new primates to the tribe are the Action Discs. Each player has a set of four discs, one for each primate type, each tied to a specific bonus effect (related to that primate type). Choosing one of these discs grants the corresponding benefit while also restricting the type of primate you can attract that round.

The primate supply is placed on the Main Board, organized by species and level. Notably, these decks are face-down, meaning players will not know the exact frame layouts of a card before acquiring it. Encircling the card slots is a score track numbered from 0 to 79.

Each player has a Player Board featuring a track numbered 0 to 12 to track accumulated rage. This rage can be spent to trash cards in play, removing them from the deck. It also includes a small area to handle resource multipliers.

Finally, there are the Objects. These represent remnants of human technology that provide special abilities during specific phases of the round when activated by spending a given number of batteries.

That is enough to get started.

Place the main board in the center of the table.
Sort the primate cards by species and level, shuffle each deck, and place them face-down on their corresponding spaces.
Shuffle the object tiles and randomly draw 3. Return the rest to the box.
Form a general supply with the resources and batteries.
Each player chooses a color and receives a player board, 2 marker discs (placed on space 0 of the score track and the rage track), 4 action discs, and a starting deck of 8 cards.

We are ready to begin!

Game Flow

A game of After Us is played over an indeterminate number of rounds. Each round consists of three phases. Keep in mind that object tiles allow players to trigger effects during various phases of the round.

Phase I: Assembly

In this phase, all players simultaneously draw 4 cards from their deck (if the deck runs out, shuffle the discard pile to form a new draw deck) and place them in front of themselves. They then decide how to arrange them horizontally to complete the side frames on the cards as effectively as possible.

Once all players have locked in their card arrangement, they resolve their effects from left to right and top to bottom. For each completed frame, the player either gains the indicated items or spends the required cost back to the supply to trigger the effect. Note that conversion effects are optional, but once skipped, they cannot be revisited. Only chimpanzees allow players to reactivate previous frames through their primary ability.

The phase ends once all players have finished resolving their actions.

Phase II: Attracting Primates

In this phase, again simultaneously and secretly, each player chooses an action disc and places it face-down on their player board. Once all players have chosen, the discs are revealed, and each player gains the corresponding bonus. Additionally, players may mimic the action disc of an adjacent neighbor by spending 2 identical resources to the supply.

After this, each player may recruit a single primate of the species matching their chosen action disc by paying 3 or 6 matching resources to draw the top card from the Level I or Level II deck of that species, placing it directly on top of their draw deck.

Players may spend 4 rage points at any point during this phase to trash a primate card from their play area and collect its printed rage reward. Unless the reward is needed immediately, it is usually resolved at the end of the phase.

Phase III: Rest

All players discard the cards in their play area, retrieve their action disc, and prepare for the next round.

Game End

The end of the game is triggered during the phase in which one or more players reach or exceed 80 points. The player with the most points at the end of that phase wins. Ties are shared. The game can also end if, during the recruitment phase, multiple players want to attract a primate of the same species and level, but there are not enough cards remaining in the supply.

Variants

Solo Mode. The player faces an automated opponent (bot). In the assembly phase, the bot reveals four cards and collects the rage reward from each. Additionally, each gorilla gives it 2 rage points, each orangutan gives it 2 batteries, each baboon gives it 2 victory points, and each chimpanzee grants the resources of all tamarin cards. In the second phase, the bot chooses the disc that allows it to recruit the highest-level primate available. In case of a tie, the discs are arranged at setup and the leftmost is chosen. During the rest phase, if the bot has at least 4 rage points, it trashes its lowest-level primate. Ties are broken by trashing the rightmost card.

Personal Opinion

“You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Charlton Heston, in one of his most legendary roles, delivered that iconic line at the climax of the original Planet of the Apes film upon realizing he was not on an uncharted alien world, but on Earth in the distant future, where humanity had clashed with a race of intelligent apes for control of the planet.

The concept of apes rising up in the future is evocative, to say the least. That is why After Us generated considerable buzz, leaning into a similar trope—though here, there is no simian-human warfare. Humanity simply died out in a mysterious cataclysm, leaving primates to inherit the Earth. Let’s see what the game brings to the table, but not before thanking Maldito Games for providing the review copy that makes this lengthy write-up possible.

In After Us, we take charge of one of these primate tribes, initially composed solely of tamarins. The goal is to rise as the dominant tribe and earn the respect of all others. To achieve this, we must stockpile resources to recruit powerful new primates specialized in different tasks.

Mechanically, we are looking at a rather unique spin on deck-building, where cards act like puzzle pieces that must be pieced together to maximize their outputs. At the start of every round, players draw the top four cards of their deck and arrange them in a line, trying to close open action frames across three rows. Some of these frames are already complete, meaning they trigger no matter what, but others are open-ended, requiring careful hand management to find the optimal arrangement for your current strategy.

This is the core puzzle around which the entire game revolves, and it acts as an immediate litmus test for whether After Us is right for you. If optimizing a spatial puzzle in solitary contemplation on your board without caring much about what anyone else is doing does not appeal to you, you should pass on this title, as it will likely feel completely bland.

Yet, deep down, it follows the foundational premise of classic deck-builders: players strive to optimize the output of their hands to build deck momentum. Momentum that, in this case, translates into a straight race to hit the target score before your opponents.

Let’s not forget that Dominion is also fundamentally a race, although Donald X. Vaccarino’s design felt more like a distance run (a 1,500-meter or steeplechase when attack cards were in the kingdom), whereas After Us is a flat-out sprint, akin to a 400-meter dash where players must burst out of the blocks and shift gears with every passing turn.

Here, momentum is gained by attracting new primates, each tailored to four pillars: scoring victory points, gathering batteries, building rage, and reusing abilities. The first is vital for obvious reasons, while the other three species provide the engine acceleration your deck needs.

Orangutans let us stockpile batteries, which can be spent on card conversion abilities or used to power functional human technology for potent bonuses. These items serve as the main source of setup variability from game to game.

Gorillas provide rage, which allows players to cull weaker cards from their decks and reach cruising speed with denser, more impactful hands—because relying on tamarins won’t make you the dominant tribe.

Finally, chimpanzees provide versatility by re-triggering previous effects, unlocking neat combos with neighboring cards. In an ideal world, every hand would draw one primate of each type to progress across all fronts: scoring points, stockpiling batteries for tech, using rage for deck thinning, and using chimpanzees to amplify your best frames.

Add to this the fact that primate cards come in two tiers, with level II cards offering significantly stronger effects at the cost of being 50% more expensive in resources. As a result, the standard gameplay loop involves collecting enough resources to afford a level II primate and selecting the matching action disc.

This brings the loop back to the highlight of each round: solving the mini-puzzle presented by your hand of cards. Depending on your leftover resources, board state, and deck composition, you try to engineer the optimal card sequence to generate the exact resources needed for the primate you plan to recruit. And that puzzle is genuinely engaging.

While it has its own twists, it remains a pure deck-builder where everyone races toward the finish line. The puzzle system admittedly streamlines things, doing away with complex chaining combos that create runaway turns. But After Us never aims to be the definitive, heavyweight deck-builder. In fact, it does not even try to redefine the genre. When evaluating it, one must keep in mind its original publisher and target audience.

French publisher Catch Up Games is known for delivering accessible, light-medium weights and fillers that, while not chasing groundbreaking complexity, consistently deliver polished, tightly designed games that achieve exactly what they set out to do. Great examples include Fertility (read the tocho-review here), Wild Space (read the tocho-review here), and the brilliant CuBirds (read the tocho-review here) or Faraway (read the tocho-review here). These are games that leave a pleasant taste in your mouth and cater to a broad audience.

You cannot demand heavy depth from titles designed for family and casual play, and that is precisely where After Us hits the mark. It will not become anyone’s desert-island deck-builder, but as a product, it accomplishes its design goals admirably.

That said, there are a few drawbacks worth noting. The main one for me is player interaction and scaling. Deck-builders without direct interaction mechanics can often feel like multi-player solitaire. Here, to keep gameplay brisk, turns are resolved simultaneously, since you only need to check what your immediate neighbors are doing during action selection. This allows the game to scale up to six players without ballooning the play time.

The issue with simultaneous play is not just multiplayer solitaire (which is undeniably present), but the slightly awkward dynamic it creates during early plays, where everyone is absorbed in their own puzzle, sliding their score markers along without any oversight from rivals. In a trusting group where no one cuts corners, this is fine. But if a group feels the urge to audit each other’s turns, downtime will drag and sour the experience.

Even then, sharing a single score track where players frequently adjust their wooden discs is somewhat clumsy. Eager hands reaching over the board can easily nudge an opponent’s marker. I would have preferred a linear track with six dedicated lanes—one per player—so discs never need to share spaces, which is what usually leads to accidental bumps. It would also make gauging player gaps much easier at a glance.

Furthermore, like most deck-builders, it is highly tactical, and shuffle luck can occasionally leave you stranded when newly acquired cards don’t line up neatly with older ones. But once again, consider the target audience: if After Us offered complex card manipulation and branching decision trees, it would lose the effortless accessibility that makes it work for casual tables.

Some may also lament the low player interaction, as the only moment you glance at opponents is when selecting an action disc—primarily to see if copying their bonus is worth the cost. While there are flashes of the psychological dynamic found in Race for the Galaxy (read the tocho-review here), where you try to predict an opponent’s choice based on their visible resources (which is fairly readable, though chimpanzees always introduce a 50% wildcard factor since they take any resource), in practice, this doesn’t drive most turns.

In my eyes, After Us sits comfortably alongside games like Splendor (read the tocho-review here) or Azul (read the tocho-review here). Seasoned hobbyists might find it a bit too light for repeat plays, but it will work wonders with casual players looking for an engaging, unpretentious board game night.

As for replayability, the modular set of object tiles injects variety from one match to the next alongside different card draws. However, because each primate species serves a very specific and fixed purpose, cards within a deck feel mechanically similar.

I would have appreciated a bit more control over card acquisition. Instead, the game adopts a blind-draw approach reminiscent of Path of Light & Shadow (read the tocho-review here), where you know the rough profile of what you are buying, but not the exact card layout, forcing you to adapt on the fly. Considering the casual target audience, this is a sensible design choice: an open market display would only introduce analysis paralysis as players agonize over which card to buy.

Turning to component quality, the production values are high. The cardboard components feature solid thickness and high-density punchboards, the wooden resource pieces have unique shapes, good weight, and crisp paint jobs, and the cards boast good core snap and smooth finish (though sleeving is always advisable for deck-builders). The rulebook is clean, logical, and unambiguous.

Visually, Vincent Dutrait works his usual magic, including localized cover art for different countries (the Spanish edition features the iconic Giralda tower in ruins) and gorgeously detailed card illustrations. The custom player boards are a lovely touch, particularly the green board featuring soccer-themed primates. A delight.

And let’s wrap this up. After Us is a light-medium weight deck-builder where players lead an ape tribe in a race to accumulate enough prestige to unite the tribes. It puts an ingenious spin on hand management by trading wall-of-text card effects for a tactile spatial puzzle where you align frames across cards for optimal resource engine turns. It is smooth, beautifully produced, and scales effortlessly across player counts thanks to simultaneous action resolution. While it doesn’t reinvent the wheel and may lack the depth or player interaction that heavier gamers crave, it achieves its goals with flying colors within Catch Up Games’ signature style: accessible, breezy, and thoroughly enjoyable. For all these reasons, I give it a…