Seth Berrier is the scripter behind Distilled’s digital presence on Tabletop Simulator. Seth is a seasoned programmer and software engineer. He has worked on projects in the commercial sector, for Benjamin Moore & Co. and ThermaSolutions Inc., and was a recipient of the Google Summer of Code grant project working on the Crystal Space 3D game engine. He teaches game development and web programming courses at the University of Wisconsin Stout and has guided dozens of games in the Junior and Senior level project courses for the game design program. For a game that comes in such a big box, Distilled is deceptively simple. From set up to scoring, everything flows smoothly and is a game that can be taught easily. Throughout your turns you will be acquiring various sugars, grains, upgrades, barrels, bottles etc all so that you can brew the best spirits that you can. And at the highest profits of course.

Sell Phase - Players bottle their spirits, score spirit points, receive money and gain a label bonus. Points and money are awarded for the cards that make up your spirit (including a barrel) that has been distilled in the previous phase. Note: While this is a game about making alcohol, it focuses more on the true science and business behind it, not the consumption! Of course, for fans of games about beer, wine, and other alcohol - such as Viticulture, Vinhos, Brewcrafters, or Homebrewers - you might find this game interesting. Or if you've ever wondered how people distill liquor or brew beer, you might find this intriguing as well! However, Distilled accommodates up to five players. That means that for your first four- or five-player game, you are looking at possibly a three-hour experience. For my final review play, I tried Distilled at five players, with three of the five players being experienced Distilled players. That game took two hours and 45 minutes. The rulebooks? Fantastic. There’s the normal instruction manual but also a “First Taste” walkthrough for new players who want something a bit more to guide a first play. The player aids are my second-favorite aids, just behind Hegemony: Lead Your Class to Victory. Most players will watch an instruction video, or read the rules just once, and be off and running during their first game. Teng Whay is the community liaison for Distilled. He is a college student majoring in Chemistry. Hailing from the little red dot of Singapore, Teng Whay is an avid gamer who loves board games and video games alike and hopes to one day be able to design, develop and publish his own board game. His favorite categories of board games are medium to heavy-weight strategy games and is always up for a challenge.

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Erik Evensen is the official artist and graphic designer for Distilled. Erik was the artist and graphic designer for Marrying Mr. Darcy, a strategy card game based on Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Mostly known for his comics work, Erik’s projects have been featured online at AV Club, Nerdist.com, Twitch, and Geek & Sundry, and in print in Graphic Design USA and the Washington Post. It is really hard to find fault in this masterpiece. But I do have a job to do… “Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.” Frank Sinatra

A few other issues. The only thing about Distilled that feels broken is the round structure. Seven rounds is too many, particularly when the player count is high. But more importantly, in a seven-round game with five players, two players get the advantage of going first twice in each game. This feels off, particularly because having the first choice of a fresh market of cards can be vital.During the same window of time, I began my tabletop writing career here at Meeple Mountain. One of the few things I love more than mixing spirits is playing games with friends and family.

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. At the end of the game the player with the most spirit points is the winner. However, all players can make moonshine or vodka right out of the box. So, even if you don’t make the recipe you want during the distill phase, you’ll still always make something. (Normally, your goal should be to NOT make moonshine or vodka, since those recipes score you almost no points.) This will turn off some people—specifically, strategy gamers—expecting the recipe fulfillment elements of distilling spirits to be more deterministic. Link to Current Rules: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t3OQY_TlnQu7uZDDhBWFMWMLtR2p9WV7/view?usp=sharing As a slight disclaimer, it is worth noting that the pics I have provided for this review were taken from my Signature Blend pledge level copy of the game. So, there may be elements not present in the base game, such as brewers from the Middle Eastern expansion, metal coins, coasters, shot glass, neoprene mat etc. But, that said, the base game and components are all produced at an excellent standard and the retail version of the game is still superb. As it is, some rounds come down to this: you’ll buy a bunch of stuff, shuffle up the cards you want to use in the recipe, then pull out the top and bottom card, and voila, you’ve got your spirit. If you only had enough money to hope for the best, you might get hosed. I had a game where I got hosed on three different turns, ending up with vodka each time. 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.Sell Phase– Players bottle their spirits, score spirit points, receive money and gain a label bonus. Points and money are awarded for the cards that make up your spirit (including a barrel) that has been distilled in the previous phase. Distilled gives players a choice of two different distillery owners, from a pool of about ten, depending on the pre-game setup. Each distillery owner offers an ongoing power and slightly different starting resources.

Cody Reimer is the copy editor for Distilled. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he teaches in the Professional Communication and Emerging Media program and the Master’s program in Technical and Professional Communication. An avid gamer, his research focuses on the intersection of games and rhetoric. His academic writing has been published in Communication Design Quarterly and the Journal of Basic Writing as well as several edited collections, and he frequently appears as a guest on the podcast Game Studies Review. Distilling a spirit is a science, it is a craft that is finely tuned and perfected over a number of years. Distilled is in essence the embodiment of this craft. Distilled is a well crafted and tasteful blend of mechanisms that when mixed together leaves a very appealing taste on the metaphorical gaming pallet. David Digby is the solo designer for Distilled. David is a designer, developer, and rulebook editor based in Colchester in the UK. David has also designed solo modes for Chocolate Factory, Eternal Palace, Swatch, Fantastic Quests, Undaunted: Reinforcements(with David Turczi) and Tinners Trail(which he also redeveloped for the new edition).At its core, Distilled is a basic Euro-style gaming experience. Variable player powers are assigned to each player in the form of their distillery owner, a mix of characters that grant a very minor power for the entire game. A shifting card market means that each game is a little different, with barrels, specialist cards, ingredients, and distillery upgrades available for a range of prices. There is so much to love about Distilled. Everything about the game and its production has been lovingly crafted. It would have been so easy for the designer to create a simple game wrapped in the theme of spirit brewing. But they have gone above and beyond in every possible way. They have taken what must have started as a simple game idea and transformed it into an excellent gaming experience. Richard Woods is the Developer for Distilled. Richard is based in Lancashire in the UK and enjoys playing and designing board games in his spare time. Richard fell in love with Distilled after joining a play test in summer 2020, and has been helping Dave to refine and balance the game ever since.