Some of those goal cards are face-down, and flipped when achieve the ones below them, a bit like 7 Wonders Duel.

You won’t be able to sell aged spirits in the round that you make them so be prepared for the fact that the next round you may be a little short on money unless you keep a little bit back. It feels odd that the act of collecting some cards, shuffling them and ditching two will make a game feel more thematic but what can I say, it really does. Your persona will give you a special bonus and the reverse side of the card will give you your starting resources and a signature recipe. This game breeds moments when you forget about the scoring track and just want to make some brandy for the round—not because it is potentially the perfect maximization in an exacting coin-to-Spirit-Point ratio, but because you just want to enjoy yourself making brandy. It’s not an easy game to begin with, but I can see this adding more life to the game for those who manage to perfect the formula, so to speak.Then they all get combined into a deck, shuffled, and the top and bottom card are discarded back to your player board for use in a later round. Most players will watch an instruction video, or read the rules just once, and be off and running during their first game. The process is fascinating, it’s like real magic, seeing these very basic ingredients transformed into something so crafted and nuanced. Distill Phase - Players will attempt to distill a liquid using the ingredients they have collected and added to the washback, add a barrel and claim a spirit label. Over the course of seven rounds you will acquire ingredients, bottles, barrels, recipes, equipment upgrades and staff to create and distill the best spirits around.

Every aspect of this game has been lovingly crafted and all the small details that have gone into it have been well received. Because the engine-building in this game is very sparse, if present at all, the seven turns are mostly uniform.

The part of the game that I found very interesting and very true to the theme was the process of making the spirits. Distilled takes much the same approach in what it’s asking you to do, but it’s a lot more…distilled and has you focus even more on the production of the spirits than it does on the day to day running of the Distillery, but there's still that factor in it. You know those teaches where you feel like Columbo and you're using the phrase “just one more thing” a bit too much.

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. I was given a copy of the retail version of the game, so while I don’t have fancy metal coins or a metal first-player marker, everything else here is top notch. The upside of this is that the cards that you pull from the top and bottom of the stack are not discarded. Each distillery owner has a “signature spirit”; some of those spirits score 8 points, but others score double that. 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.

I brewed all-grain, which is starting from the grain, hops and yeast, and ending up with tasty, brown, dancing fuel. This meant that when everything is placed back into the game box, everything rested perfectly flush with the rim.

The real question you have to ask yourself is, is the game worth pairing with a 60 year old MacCutcheon Whisky or is it only worth breaking out the cheap supermarket own brand? This add a lot of flavor to the game, oh yea there are flavors you can add to your spirits too for bonuses. In the game, you have inherited a distillery, and are hoping to someday achieve the title of master distiller through purchasing goods, building up your distillery, and creating the world’s most renowned spirits. Distillery upgrades are great long term, but spending that cash now means that you may not get the ingredients or storage to make what you want this round.

I have to rule out tableau-building because the standard market actions are not upgraded or expanded upon in any way as new cards are bought and the game progresses in rounds.