What comes after us?

After Us 🦍 is played in the year 2083. Humankind has perished but apes kept on evolving - they are gathering in tribes, collecting knowledge and trying to understand human items. You play as the leader of such a tribe.

It’s a deck-building and resource management game, and a race to reach 80 knowledge points 💡. Gameplay is super streamlined - learning the rules takes about 5 minutes. It’s also very multiplayer-solitaire.

You all start with 8 basic cards, but as the game goes on you can add and remove cards from your deck. At the start of a round everyone draws 4 cards. This part is the meat of the game: 🧐 you have to arrange your 4 cards next to each other, trying to efficiently connect boxes at the sides of cards. This is a mechanic I enjoy in other titles too! 😊

Then everyone just activates all of their closed boxes, gaining or exchanging things. There are 3 resource types 🍊 that are mainly used to recruit new apes, and energy 🔋, which is for activating human artifacts - each game you randomly choose 3 artifact tiles that everyone can use. Another important thing from cards is knowledge 💡. The more advanced apes can have additional special icons.

After this phase everyone plays one of their player discs. These show a bonus and a type of ape you can recruit by paying its specific resource cost and adding it to your deck.
Then just discard your cards, draw 4 new ones and start the next round - rinse and repeat until someone reaches 80 points! 🏆

As it’s all simultaneous, playtime should be the same whether you are playing solo or with 6 players - this also means you won’t really be able to see what everyone is doing, as every player is just frantically taking and paying resources. You do get stronger as your deck gets better, but there isn’t much player agency other than organizing your 4 cards. For example the decks of cards you buy from are face down, so you only know the type of card you are buying, but not its specific icons.

It is a fun concept and perhaps a cool gateway experience, but to be honest, we are not sure about the replayability. And we also feel like there are just not enough decisions to make, to make the experience worthwhile.