The gameplay function of losing the first and last cards of your spirit deck is what makes Distilled so much fun. A typical round is made up of four phases; Market, Distill, Sell and Age phase and players will gain "Spirit" points over the course of seven rounds. As I said earlier, it makes the whole distilling process a little bit more interesting and adds a tension to the game that can lead each player to have their own private little “yay or nay” moments. Use cards to purchase new ingredients and invest in upgrades to your distillery, all while eventually distilling the spirit and sending it to the warehouse. This may well be the game that brings certain non-gamers into the hobby or at least allows them to enjoy a game night when they otherwise wouldn’t.

Fans of Viticulture and Vinhos: Deluxe Edition will also enjoy the theme here, but Distilled has a few more elements of luck and randomness built into its design, which will turn off strategic gamers looking for something comparable. Two basic ingredients can be purchased from the basic market and premium ingredients, items and upgrades can be purchased from the main market. Each of these distillers also has a signature recipe and signature ingredient that only they can make. Rather than a beat-your-own-score mode, or an automa opponent, instead it’s a goal-based solo mode, in the same vein as Terraforming Mars.

I think the behavior will be much better if you use this official TTS hotseat mode than anything I might hack together.

They are worth picking up and adding into your washback but there is a cost to these and balancing what to spend your hard earned cash on is not an easy decision to make. Over the course of seven rounds you will acquire ingredients, bottles, barrels, recipes, equipment upgrades and staff to create and distill the best spirits around. 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 is a lot of interest in translating to various languages (with the physical version of the game) and I have my own interest in it being a part of TTS as well.Comparing the ingredients to your unlocked recipes to see which you have brewed can be a make-or-break part of the round. After further thought, I do not believe that Distilled functions as a deck- or tableau-builder but it is a very light implementation of engine-building. So, even if you don’t make the recipe you want during the distill phase, you’ll still always make something. This may have been down to me not selecting a balanced choice of characters, but it seemed odd that they could be so mismatched. Alcohol cards are added for each sugar, all cards are shuffled, the top and bottom cards are removed and placed in your supply for future rounds.

Some powers seem situationally better for an entire game, whereas others feel good only when a specific scenario pops up. I haven’t played Distilled 50 times, so I will never know if this imbalance between the distillery owner cards is real or imagined. Distilled puts you in the shoes of someone who has inherited an old abandoned distillery and is tasked with bringing it back to the prosperous business it used to be.Better yet, Distilled is a great entry-level game for those non-gamers who could be persuaded into a game night solely because of the game’s central conceit.

I steadily found games to take 30-40 minutes per player, a number that I’m sure would decrease with increased experience. There are a couple of upgraded levels of pledging that add more content to the game so defiantly look into that if your interested. Points and money are awarded for the cards that make up your spirit (including a barrel) that has been distilled in the previous phase.The asymmetry in distillery identities (the people who you play and who own these upstart distilleries) is slightly superficial as most boil down to gaining roughly a coin and a half per round during one phase or another—if not just a direct deposit into a player’s reserves. When you are doing a run of spirits the first bit off and the last bit off are very poor tasting and potentially poisonous.