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

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Also—and this is purely a guess based on my plays, so take this with a grain of salt—the distillery owner cards feel unbalanced.

So now with the cards you have remaining you will create your spirit based on the recipes that you have acquired. 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 idea for such a game came to him during a 2019 visit to Scotland filled with distillery tours and whiskey sampling.

Some of the spirits have a specific ingredient requirement and by removing two cards you may remove the only two cards that you need to complete a recipe. 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. 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. Then deal each player two distiller identity cards to choose from, but only use the ones that match the regions of the spirits you’re using (there’s handy lists in the rule book for this).

Whilst this doesn’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, it is just one of those things that irk me. At the end of a round you'll see if any players meet the criteria to score one of the public bonuses. I have found that in rounds six and seven, sometimes players have so much money they can’t spend it all. 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. 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.Comparing the ingredients to your unlocked recipes to see which you have brewed can be a make-or-break part of the round.