Distilled is a medium-weight euro game from Paverson Games where 1-5 players are competing to collect the most victory points by running their own distilleries.
Each player takes on the persona of a character who has inherited a distillery and a 'signature recipe'. You almost certainly won't be able to complete your signature recipe in the first round but you can always make moonshine or vodka. These are default recipes to which all players have access.
Your character will give you some starting ingredients, a small amount of cash and an asymmetric special ability. You will then be putting together water, yeast and sugars in various combinations in order to distil spirits that you can sell to earn more money and victory points. You can buy items, ingredients and upgrades from the premium market display, and you can unlock additional recipes. You can also buy or get for free ingredients and items from the basic market, but most players can only get two basic market items each round.
When players have all spent all they want in the markets (ie: everyone has passed), it's time to distil. You put together all the yeast, water and sugar cards that you want to distil (you must ordinarily have at least one of each) and you add an alcohol card for each sugar card. You shuffle all these cards and remove the top and bottom card. These go back to your individual player board for use on a subsequent turn. What remains is the spirit you've distilled. In the first round, that's likely to be either moonshine or vodka but in subsequent rounds, when you've unlocked the recipes and been able to acquire the specific ingredients, you'll be able to distil more valuable spirits. When you sell a spirit, you get the cash and points value for that spirit plus the cash/points values of all the cards you've used, including those for its storage and bottling.
The mechanic where you remove the top and bottom card is a neat device. It's not arbitrary: it replicates the process in real-world distilling of running off the 'heads' and 'tails' to remove the poisonous light alcohols and unpleasant flavours. In game terms, it introduces a core push-your-luck mechanic into the game. If you're setting out to make a specific spirit but find one of your core ingredients has been taken out, then the spirit you end up with will only be a lower grade and less valuable product. You can minimise the risk by putting in more ingredients than you need. For example, if you are attempting to distill a spirit that requires two grain sugars, then you reduce the prospect of having your plans frustrated if you include three grain sugars and you eliminate the risk altogether if you put four grain in the mix. Putting in too many ingredients may seem inefficient but the extra ingredients may add to the income generated by the spirit and/or its points value when you sell it.
Some spirits can be sold immediately they've been produced but others require aging - usually in a barrel or clay vessel (depending on the spirit). Assuming you have acquired the requisite method of storage, aging means deferring your sale by one or more turns, but you'll be adding to its cash and points value as you add a flavour card for each year of aging.
Distilled then is a card drafting, hand management, set collection economic game. Players are mostly doing their own thing: in-game interaction is really just limited to competition for cards in the premium market display. However, there are various open and hidden objective cards which award valuable points bonuses based on being the first to meet the target or having done better than other players at the end of the game (for example, having distilled more different spirits than other players).
Designer Dave Beck has given us ample variation in Distilled, including multiple recipe cards, so there's bound to be variation from one play to the next. It's a busy board and some elements may seem initially fiddly but it's actually easy to learn and play, and once you're underway gameplay is as smooth as a fine cognac, with players carrying out their distillation simultaneously. It can be frustrating at times - when you lose a key ingredient from your distillation or when the sugar or barrel you need is stubbornly absent from the market display - but that's all part of the fun of the game. Some of the character's special abilities are markedly stronger than others but that is balanced at least in part by the points values of their signature recipes. Our only real gripe was that some of the icons on the cards were rather small - for example, the region icons that are used for certain set collection bonuses. On the other hand, Erik Evensen's art really enhances the theme.
And the beauty of Distilled is how strongly the theme comes through. Indeed, it's so strongly evocative that you may need to resist the temptation to play Distilled as a drinking game - perhaps where you down a shot each round that corresponds to the spirit you've distilled. Hard as it may be, you should avoid this temptation: after seven rounds, you'll be too sozzled to add up the end-game scores!
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