After Us is a tranquilizer. And not the gentle soporific kind that lets you slip little by little into drowsiness. It’s a knockout drug in a pressurized dart that’s been fired straight into your artery and dragged you kicking into a coma. I suspect that wasn’t what Florian Sirieix was designing for, but here we are.

It looks nice, at least.

You wouldn’t know it to look at it. Like most board games, After Us opens with an image. Illustrated by the talented Vincent Dutrait, both its cover and the artwork within evoke the recent-ish Planet of the Apes prequels, all crumbling human architecture and bold simian pioneers. This is hardly the first time a board game has drawn from film, and you could do a lot worse as far as inspirations go. As glaciers continue to melt in the dead of the antarctic winter, why not daydream about our successors, ones who might prove a little more connected to their mother planet?

This is why not. Right from the get-go, After Us doesn’t propose a planet of the apes so much as a snoozefest of the apes. The central conceit is that your cards are assembled side by side, action boxes aligning to gather resources or create simple triggers. It’s a perfectly fine idea, although the execution is so bland that it’s like visiting the zoo to see the monkey house, except it’s one of those days when all the exhibits are mysteriously closed. All that lingers is the smell. Boxes are indeed arranged, but there’s so little spark running through this game’s head that there’s rarely anything resembling a decision to be made. Instead, one is often best served by simply aligning as many box edges as possible and hoping they provide the best bonuses. Quantity over quality. All the thrills of dropping a rectangular block through a rectangle-shaped hole.

Perhaps this would have proved more interesting had you been given control over your cards. Sadly, that isn’t the case. This is a deck-builder where one doesn’t build a deck so much as lodge suggestions. Each round allows you to attract one more ape to your cause, spending the resources that appeal to mandrills, orangutans, gorillas, or chimpanzees. But apart from knowing their general attributes, their specifics are entirely invisible. You have no idea what resources their cards will prefer, whether their trigger boxes will skew left or right, how many scavenged batteries you might require. There’s no such thing as planning ahead.

The monkey market.

With so few tethers between the players and the game, every motion becomes automatic rather than deliberative. It’s a shockingly easy game to zone out on. Sirieix’s priorities on the matter are clear: he prioritizes speed over everything else, including the reason people bother to sit down at a table together. Everyone is playing at the same time, and drawing cards blindly from the market services that aim. There are still phases, little checkpoints that force everyone to ensure they’re in alignment. But with so little reason to look up from your own cards and resources, losing sync is a real threat. It isn’t only that this is multiplayer solitaire; it’s that it’s solitaire absent the joy of building your own engine. All that remains is the gesture at playing. More than once, somebody at the table has realized that they went ahead with the next turn because they’d assumed everybody was moving at the same stultifying pace. After Us is pitched as a race, but it’s a race between two to six drivers in black boxes, all tootling around the track until one of them declares victory and the others glance up from the cockpit, bleary-eyed and dazed.

Is there anything positive worth mentioning? Apart from the artwork, not really. I suppose it’s interesting that the gorillas earn points by winnowing other apes from your deck, an action that feels far more pointed than it does in other deck-builders. Where After Us’s peers don’t make winnowing personal, here one is reminded instead of chimpanzee cannibalism. This might have made for an intriguing look at the game’s emerging society, if only After Us had thought that far ahead. Then again, the same could be said about a whole range of details.

My simian squad.

Rarely have I played a game that felt this bad. Isn’t the point of multiplayer solitaire that everybody gets to focus on their own little demesne, tending their garden with nary a nibble from neighboring vermin? After Us is what happens when the garden is sufficiently walled off, but there’s no joy in the tilling or harvest. You’re building an engine, but its cogs and gears are drawn from insufficiently labeled boxes rather than selected at will. This game is a tranquilizer. Or better yet, it should have included one in the box. At least that way we could have emerged from a session slightly refreshed rather than groggy from so much meandering.

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A complimentary copy was provided.