Distilling My Thoughts: My Early Impressions of Distilled

Welcome to this week’s gaming post! This week I’m discussing a very thematic spirit-making game. So without further ado, let’s jump into the recent highlights.

I recently did an unboxing video for Distilled, and now I’ve also had the chance to get it to the table for a few plays. Distilled is a game all about distilling spirits (go figure) from around the world. Every round, players buy ingredients, items, and distillery upgrades from the shared market before combining ingredients to distill a spirit. There are seven rounds in the game, and all players get to distill a spirit each round.

First up, although I know very little about distilleries or making spirits, I really enjoyed how well the theme is integrated into the gameplay. This is even shown through a push-your-luck mechanism during the distillation round that forces you to remove the top and bottom card from your spirit stack to represent removing the poisonous “heads” and unpleasant “tails” from the still.

I also loved the components and inserts for the game. The individual player recipe “clipboards” are dual-layered with a slot to slide in the recipe card for that game, and the base game comes with eight different tasting flights to mix up which spirits are available for each game. There are also plastic trays for holding money, recipe cubes, as well as for separating out tokens for each of the fifteen different spirits, which makes setup and teardown a breeze. Although I didn’t back the Kickstarter, I love that there’s only one version of the game, which makes the retail version feel nicer than even some deluxe games. 

While I haven’t played the game enough to get a full sense of its variety, I still appreciate the variability I saw in the base game alone. This is shown through the eight tasting flights that allow you to mix the gameplay, as well as a bunch of unique distiller upgrade cards, ingredients, and items. On the flip side, and again I haven’t played the game enough times to fully tell, the spirits don’t feel that different from one another. The main differences are how much of each sugar type the spirit requires, what type of barrel it has to be made in, and whether it has to be aged first before being sold. Therefore, while each game you can change out which spirits are available for that particular game, games still end up feeling very similar.

This leads me into my main critique for the game. It’s hard to fully describe it, but the gameplay feels very much rinse and repeat. At the beginning of each game, I usually decide which of the three sugar types I’m going to focus on (usually the one that matches my signature recipe), and then I make some combination of those spirit types. Usually I make the cheaper ones in the early game for an injection of cash before transitioning to aged recipes later in the game. Also, since there are seven rounds, with four phases in each round, I feel the mechanical elements (buy ingredients and items, distill, sell, and then age) more so than in other games.

The one part of the game that I’m still conflicted on is the push-your-luck element I mentioned earlier. In the handful of games I’ve played, there have already been a few times where I’ve hedged my bets by getting upgrades to help with the luck mitigation or by adding additional ingredients to dilute my sugars but get my plans messed up by poor luck during the distillation step. If it happens early in the game, it’s not too punishing, but if you try to distill an expensive spirit that has to be aged during the sixth round and you miss out, it feels very punishing. I don’t think the game would have been as enjoyable without that push-your-luck element because it would have made the game feel even more mechanical, but I do wish there could have been a way to help with the luck mitigation a little more.

Overall, the theming and components will be what makes me want to return to Distilled in the future. However, I feel this is a game that I’ll pull out every so often, rather than repeat plays back-to-back to avoid that rinse-and-repeat feeling I’ve started to get. 

With that, I’ll wrap up this week’s gaming highlights! I’d love to hear your thoughts on any of the games I’ve mentioned, future content, or format in the comments section below. Happy gaming!

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