The Spirits Are Among Us

Making alcohol is something of a recurring theme in the board gaming world. There are multiple games about making wine and making beer, a couple of them major hits that are well known among board game enthusiasts. Now comes a new game about making other spirits, from whiskey and gin and rum to soju and cachaça and baijiu: Distilled.

Over the course of seven rounds, players make the best spirits they can to amass the most points possible. Each round begins with a shared phase in which players take turns acquiring ingredients and upgrades to their distillery. It then moves to a shared distilling phase, featuring an intriguing little mechanic that's the game's twisty little innovation. Finally, players sell or age their spirits before the process repeats.

For the most part, there aren't any radical new mechanics in Distilled, though that isn't really to the game's detriment. It's a fun little puzzle as engine building games often are, challenging you to find the right balance between investments and profits that let you move on to bigger things without falling too far behind in the ultimate race for points. The game includes many more types of spirits than can actually be made in a single game, with several different "menus" included to use for different plays; this changes up the nature of the puzzle from one play to the next so it can't be too easily "solved." (Players also take on the role of a character with a unique benefit that affects the course of your strategy.)

But Distilled is not simply remixing board game systems in its own recipe. One mechanic at the heart of it all simulates the distilling process in an intriguing way. You're allowed to throw together basically any ingredient cards you want each turn, but each spirit has specific definitional requirements -- for example: one spirit might require at least one sugar of a specific one of the game's three types, while another might require at least two sugars of a different type. When the time comes to distill, you must gather up all the yeast, water, and sugar cards you've allocated for the turn. To them, you add one alcohol card (a card which works as a "wild" of sorts -- either water or yeast) for every sugar you included. Then you shuffle them all and randomly remove the top and bottom card of your shuffled stack -- the undrinkable "heads" and "tails" of your batch of booze. Then you reveal what's left to learn what you've made.

There are some subtle ramifications of this system that aren't only about luck of the draw. You can always include more ingredients than necessary to make a thing, and this generally gives you more victory points, more income, or both -- so "overloading" a recipe for fear of the cards that might randomly get removed isn't necessarily a harmful strategy. You actually get back the ingredient cards that get kicked out in this process, to use again in a future recipe on a future round of the game -- so no setback can really be that large, and you might even be able to turn it into a windfall.

But mostly, I find this system a fun and flavorful distillation of the game's central theme. I can't claim that Distilled is like no other game I've played before; it's made of the same kinds of game design "atoms" any long-time gamer has encountered in other places. But this one little twist suits this game well, and carves out a space for it in a collection alongside those others. Some players may want more player interaction, and others less. Some players may want a shorter run time, and others longer. But I have found Distilled to be a satisfying "the main game we play this evening," and I look forward to playing it more. I give it a B+.