After Us Unboxing – Card Drafting from Pandasaurus Games

I’m a really big fan of card drafting games, so when I saw After Us being demoed at GenCon 2023, I knew it was a game I wanted to play. Thanks to our friends at Pandasaurus Games, we had the chance to take a copy home with us! After unboxing it over on the No Shelf Space YouTube channel, I’ve decided to lay it all out here in print for mas well! Let’s dive in and see what comes in the box.

“After Us is a deck-building and resource management game featuring an original and intuitive combo system in which players are each leading a tribe of apes. Starting only with tamarins, they combine their cards each turn to collect resources and gather victory points, attracting new apes into their tribe along the way: powerful gorillas, resourceful orangutans, versatile chimpanzees, and wise mandrills. The first player to obtain 80 points prevails in the race to collective intelligence — and wins the game.”

After Us includes a variety of both wooden and cardboard resources and tiles, a long with numerous decks of cards. The game can be played with 2-5 players, although 6 player boards are included in the box. Each players gets 1 player board, one deck of 8 starting tamarin monkey cards, 2 wooden disks (one for tracking Rage and the other for tracking your score), and a set of 4 cardboard tokens used to decide which action you will take each turn.

There are 4 resources in the game: flowers, fruit, grain, and energy. I love seeing the blue flowers, orange fruit, and black grain tokens all being produced in wood, but was a little disappointed that the energy chits were made of cardboard. Ultimately, since energy works a bit different than the other three resources (i.e. it cannot be used to purchase monkeys directly), I guess it’s not totally insane that the tokens are a different style.

On the main board you will find 8 decks of cards, 2 per monkey type (Gorilla, Chimpanzee, Orangutan, and Mandril). There is a Level 1 deck and a Level 2 deck for each monkey. The card quality throughout is great. Often times I will look to sleeve cards in deck building games, and while I’ll likely do that here eventually as well, the quality is good enough to hold up over dozens of games.

The final pieces are the cardboard tokens that dictate which special action can be taken each game. These cardboard pieces are fantastic quality, and leave little to be desired.

The only downside to After Us, in my opinion, is the game’s insert. While it definitely does the job and nicely lays out where all the cards and pieces should go, I was disappointed that it was a simple cardboard insert. Mine has already fallen apart after only a few games, and while all the pieces still stay where they are suppose to, it’s a bit of a messy look each time I open the box.

There you have it! Everything included in After Us from Pandasaurus Games. We will have a full review of the game after we play it a bit more, so stay tuned!