Review: Distilled (Paverson Games)

You still can’t quite believe it, but the letter in your hands is very clear. Congratulations, it reads, you inherited a distillery.

That’s the backstory for Distilled from Paverson Games. The game takes 1-5 players on a journey to rebuild and expand their family’s distillery, learn to make spirits from around the globe, and maybe even re-create their ancestor’s special signature recipe with their equally special custom ingredient.

Grab your favorite drink (soda for me, thanks; I’m writing) as we go through the top five things you need to know about Distilled.

Setting up the Game

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There’s a lot of stuff in this game box, so invest a few moments to take inventory and familiarize yourself with everything.

There are card decks for the basic ingredients and equipment you’ll use to distill your products, plus decks of upgrades, premium ingredients, and items that simplify your process and improve your finished products. Once you set up the game a few times, you’ll remember where everything goes on the table.

Every player gets a double-thickness game board that represents your distillery. There’s a space on the right of the board to put the tasting flight you’ll use and your character’s special recipe (more about those in a moment).

Picking Your Identity

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After laying out the various decks of cards during setup, players agree on one of eight tasting flight cards for this play. The flight you pick determines which alcohols you’ll distill during the game and which of the 18 identity cards will be available to the players.

Distilled has an asymmetrical flavor thanks to the identities. Each identity card tells the story of your character, identifies the person’s signature ingredient and recipe, and lists your starting money and ingredients. The card also shows which geographic region your person hails from (important for scoring at game end) and explains that person’s special ability.

Be sure to check the tasting flight charts in the back of the rules (pages 18-19 in ours) to assemble the correct identities for your chosen tasting flight. (We missed that step during our first two games. Oops. It definitely makes a difference.)

Distillation 101

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The game’s main loop involves buying from the market, distilling a spirit, and either selling or aging what you produced.

In the market phase, you can learn new recipes, pick up premium ingredients, upgrade your distillery, or spoil your customers with cool bottles. You can also get cheap basic ingredients that are good enough to get you by. In this phase, you need to balance how you spend your limited funds. You always need enough ingredients to produce something, but adding the right upgrade or the perfect bottle could make a big impact.

The game’s magic happens in the distill phase. Here, you lay out the ingredients in the product for this round, then you count your sugars and add that many alcohol cards. Finally, you shuffle the ingredients and the alcohols, put the top and bottom cards back into your storeroom to use with your next production run, and see what you made.

Following the Recipe

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It’s a bit of a surprise to find out what you distilled each round. Every spirit in the game needs a specific combination of ingredients. For example, gin needs two or more fruit cards, while whiskey wants two or more grains. After removing your deck’s top and bottom card, you compare what you have left to the recipes you know.

You can almost always make either moonshine or vodka, but you get more points and money for other spirits. If the spirit you made can be sold immediately, then you add a bottle to your spirit stack, count the money you made, and calculate your victory points. Well done!

Aging and Selling

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Some spirits must be aged for at least one round in a wooden or clay barrel before you can sell them. The aging process makes these goods more valuable, but it interrupts your cash flow. Aging a spirit also takes space in your warehouse, so you need to track that.

To simulate aging, you draw a card from the flavor deck and add it face down to your spirit deck. Aging is a mysterious process, and you don’t know how something will taste until you decide to crack the barrel. The flavor cards never hurt your liquor, but they might add some humor. In one of our games, a carefully aged whiskey came out with notes of smoky vanilla seaweed, along with the unmistakeable aftertaste of a gym bag.

Verdict

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There’s a lot to love about Distilled, and we love it all.

The combination of eight tasting flights with 18 unique player identities guarantees plenty of replayability. Add to that the uncertainty of the distillation and aging process, and the mix of premium ingredients, distillery upgrades, and myriad bottles and barrels, and you get a game with an intoxicating mix of strategy, luck, and the rarest ingredient of all: surprise.