Distilled Expansions Review: Refining the Distillery

Welcome to this week’s review! This week I’m taking a look at two expansions for the popular distillery themed game – Distilled.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a post detailing my early impressions of Distilled. If you’re not familiar with the game, players take ownership of a distillery with the goal of producing and selling the highest quality spirits. At the time of my post, I thought the game was excellently produced, and while I’m not the most knowledgeable on spirits, I found the theme to be highly captivating. I did have some issues with the design, most notable the luck element during the distillation phase, but I was eager to see what changes these two expansions would add and if my thoughts on the game have changed in the last two years. So, without further ado, let’s jump into it.

Disclosure: A review copy of this game was provided to The Meeple Digest in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.

First up is the physically larger of the two expansions – the Africa & Middle East expansion. The easiest way that I can describe this expansion is that it adds more of almost everything. As the name suggests, this expansion adds a new Africa and Middle East region, along with new distillers, spirits, and bottles from that region. To account for the new additions, there are also six new tasting flights. The expansion also adds some new distillery upgrades, premium ingredients and items, flavor and goal cards, and spirit awards. There’s plenty of new content included in this expansion, and it adds even more variety to the game.

One new mechanism the expansion adds is the new premium ingredient cards. There are now double sugar cards that count as two of the same sugars and each produce two alcohol cards when distilling. While this is a big benefit, these cards also increase the amount of push-your-luck in the sense that if you remove one of these cards from your stack during the distillation phase, then you also remove two sugars instead of usual one.

The other type of new premium ingredient is wild sugars. These count as any of the three sugar types. Unlike the double sugars, these add some nice luck mitigation and flexibility when deciding which type of spirit to distill.

Moving onto the smaller in size Cask Strength expansion. While this expansion is contained to just a small deck of cards, I found that between the two expansions, this one shakes up the core gameplay more.

First off, this expansion adds a new set of upgraded premium ingredient cards that can either be swapped or combined with the original set from the base game. These new cards offer special powers when added to the player’s spirit stack. For example, there are some cards that offer additional victory points for each type of card included in your final spirit stack. To make up for the stronger effects, these cards are also more expensive than the ones from the base game. I personally found that these cards added some nice depth and introduced new choices when deciding which cards to purchase, since I not only had to think about the type of ingredient, but also the unique effects they provided.

The other big change that this expansion adds is a dynamic set of market cards. Starting in the second round, one market card is displayed which alters the price of certain types of ingredients, as well as impacts the sell price of spirits from the different regions. For example, one market card might specify that grain sugars are more expensive to purchase that round, while plant sugars are cheaper. In addition, players can always see what the next round’s market card will be, allowing players to plan ahead. Since money can be especially tight in Distilled, I found that these market cards added another layer of strategy around timing when to not only purchase cards, but also when to sell your distilled spirits.

Finally, the expansion adds four new distillery upgrade and flavor cards to add even more variety to the game.

Of the two expansions, I found that Cask Strength made me alter my usual strategy the most. One of my previous complaints with Distilled was that games could play out in a relatively linear sense. For example, in the earlier rounds, I might focus on selling some lesser quality spirits for some early money, and then gradually transition to higher quality aged spirits as the game progressed, usually focusing around one of the three types of sugars. That strategy is still possible with this expansion, but due to the upgraded premium ingredients and dynamic market cards, there are more avenues to deviate from that strategy, and those paths are more likely to work out better.

The only downside with this expansion is that it is tailored more towards experienced Distilled players. While I’ll likely always keep the new distillery and flavor cards each game, it is fairly easy to swap the premium ingredient deck back over to the base game version and exclude the dynamic market cards when playing with newer players.

Overall, both the Africa & Middle East and Cask Strength expansions are solid additions to Distilled. Africa & Middle East adds more variety, whereas Cask Strength adds a bit more depth for those more strategic gamers. If I had to choose one over the other, I’d likely pick Cask Strength, as the changes introduced alternated the ways I approached the game more. Ultimately, these expansions don’t necessarily fix my main concerns with the game, and if you’re someone who bounced off Distilled, I don’t think these expansions will change your mind. However, for those who already enjoy Distilled, these two expansions are an easy recommendation.

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s review! If you’ve played Distilled or either of these expansions, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And stay tuned next week for a review of the newest expansion – Distilled: Cocktails. Happy gaming!

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