Distilled Review

My most anticipated game ever. Did it live up to the hype?

Distilled was a game that I learned about very early into the hobby and I immediately started trying to learn more about it and immerse myself into the game. I was lucky enough to be a playtester of the solo mode and I didn't stop thinking about it ever since. When it arrived, I don't think I've opened a game and played it faster than I did with this.

In Distilled, you inherit a distillery and need to bring it back to it's original prestige by purchasing ingredients, items, recipes, and upgrades in order to make the best alcohol you can make. Everyone starts with a random character and their signature recipe and whatever starting income/abilities they have. Each round begins with the market phase. Here you can spend money on premium ingredients that can net you points or money when selling. You can also buy distillery upgrades that can give you special abilities or bonuses or you can buy bottles/barrels for selling and aging spirits. You can also buy new recipes. Since you only start with vodka and moonshine you'll want to start getting these. Players can purchase 2 basic ingredients each round.

Once everyone has bought what they need, we move onto the distill phase. This consists of adding cards from your pantry to the washback. This is the area on the side of your player board. You'll need to add water, yeast, and as many sugars as you want. For each sugar, an alcohol card is added which further increase your value. You'll combine the 3 stacks and shuffle them together removing the top and bottom card back to your pantry. This is an actual concept in distilling to remove any impurities. From there, you'll see what your spirit consists of and determine what kind of alcohol you've made. See why you want new recipes? Then you must add them to a barrel from your supply. If you're selling, it'll be the metal one but if you are aging, it must be a wooden one.

Once you've done this, the selling phase begins. Here you'll add a bottle from your supply to the stack and add up the money value and points value of the cards and from your recipe sheet. You also get the benefit of a one time bonus by taking a label and covering one of the spots on your board. This mostly consists of free items or recipes but you can also bring in your special ingredient for the signature recipe.

If you decide to age a spirit, you won't sell but you'll put the barrel into your warehouse and add a random flavor card to the bottom of the pile. These grant more points and money when selling. You do not need to sell at any point in the game for these as they'll score points regardless, you'll just miss out on money.

Finally, clean up. You'll continue this for 7 rounds and then tally up scores. Final scoring is determined by your special objectives, distillery upgrades, bottle collection, and whatever spirits are aging in your warehouse. Whoever has the most points becomes the master distiller and is the winner.

The Good: I love how true the game tries to be to the overall distilling process without overcomplicating things. The general push your luck aspect of it works really well but there are ways to eliminate it by ensuring you have enough of a sugar so that even if you remove 2 of them somehow you'll still make what you need. There's also upgrades that can let your redo your distilling. It's all really well thought out. The sheer amount of different characters and recipe cards means you'll be playing this game for a while without seeing the same thing twice. This isn't as big of a deal but the storage solution is great. The tray to hold all of the recipe cards is barrel shaped and looks really cool but everything has a place and it all works. I appreciate that so much. Especially with a box this sized. Also, my description is essentially the core concept of the game. There's nuances, of course, but if that makes sense then you can easily start playing. The game includes a quick start guide for your first game with some basic strategy but it's a blast to just dig into it for yourself.

The Okay: You're at the mercy of the market at times and it can be brutal. While there are plenty of ways to make your booze, but if you specialize and need certain sugars or expensive ones you may need to get creative or wait another round and hope it's still there. At times, it feels like you never have enough money for what you are attempting to do or just have bad luck and may wind up making a moonshine you didn't want. There's some ways to mitigate this by over-alocholing your drinks to offset sugars or upgrades will let you re-do one distillation phase.

The Not So Good: While a lot of things can happen at the same time for players, games do tend to feel a bit longer than you planned for. Especially at higher counts. 7 rounds feels both too long and too short. Some games, I'm just getting things going by round 7 and then it's over.

Final Thoughts: Distilled was everything I wanted from it. Even in it's earliest stages, my expectations were high. Dave Beck really put a ton of work into the game, going as far as understanding the ins and outs of distillation and the different types of drinks you could make. For me, it checks so many boxes, push-you-luck, tight economy, booze, it's wonderful. If you're a little hesitant on the theme, I'd say to try it out anyways. It's a phenomenal game regardless of theme.

Thanks to Paverson Games for providing a review copy.