Distilled: A Spirited Strategy Game, Highly-Thematic Euro Game, Strie for The Title of Master Distiller, 30 Minute Play Time, for 1 to 5 Players, Ages 14 and up

Product Information

For my final review play, I tried Distilled at five players, with three of the five players being experienced Distilled players.

That means that for your first four- or five-player game, you are looking at possibly a three-hour experience. During the first phase of each round, you can spend your profits on the equipment and staff cards I mentioned before, and more importantly, the ingredients. Every aspect of this game has been lovingly crafted and all the small details that have gone into it have been well received. It works great at taking you through the process of making different spirits whilst giving you enough of an economic puzzle to back up the fun of getting the best out of your booze. The problem with this is that any ingredients you used in your spirit go back to the market at the end of the round.We’ve only just learned it and played once but I’m impressed that at its core it’s really one main and simple mechanic and then just surrounded by a lot of ways to strategize and get more points. That tightness of only being able to make one spirit per round means that you want to try and make the best you can every time to get those all important points, but that little economic game that sits underneath makes you constantly aware that this game is still about running a business. In that game—a game where I produced vodka four times—I lost by 40 points despite doing a decent job of trying to mitigate a bad card draw. At the end of a round you'll see if any players meet the criteria to score one of the public bonuses. This may have been down to me not selecting a balanced choice of characters, but it seemed odd that they could be so mismatched.

I have toured several distilleries and was married at one so I have the basics of distillation down (read as I know about it but not enough to actually do it).Well, pour yourself a few fingers of your golden nectar of choice, and settle in, for I have a few words to say on the subject.

Spending an entire round to pull together everything you need to make a big point scorer, only to see it turn to vodka all because of a bad draw can be really frustrating.Distilled gives players a choice of two different distillery owners, from a pool of about ten, depending on the pre-game setup. Then, things totally flip over, particularly for a player that sells a fancier spirit after aging it in their warehouse. Because of that I can easily see people being put off of this game based just on that alone, and honestly, I wouldn’t blame you. There’s tons of variety in the cards on offer, the characters you play, the geographic restrictions and bonuses offered by those same characters, and the spirits they create. There are a couple of upgraded levels of pledging that add more content to the game so defiantly look into that if your interested.