Market Phase – Players will acquire new ingredients, items, upgrade and staff to add into their distillery. Ingredients placed in the washback are used in creating a spirit and at least one card Yeast, Sugar and Water card must be used. The rulebook is thorough and well-written, with great examples, but in isolation doesn’t make as much sense as playing along with it. Some powers seem situationally better for an entire game, whereas others feel good only when a specific scenario pops up. Little things like storing tokens in whisky barrel shaped trays always bring a rye smile to my face.

For my final review play, I tried Distilled at five players, with three of the five players being experienced Distilled players. Sell Phase – Players bottle their spirits, score spirit points, receive money and gain a label bonus. The part of the game that I found very interesting and very true to the theme was the process of making the spirits.Players add yeast, water, and sugar cards to the “Washback” area of their board, then shuffle those cards. So set it up, sit down with your favourite drink (please drink responsibly) and you’ll be ready to play. Some of those goal cards are face-down, and flipped when achieve the ones below them, a bit like 7 Wonders Duel. 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.

You’re left making some lesser spirit potentially, which in a game as tight as this can feel like a big loss. You then take all the cards in your washbag, give them a shuffle (face down), remove the top and bottom card and the remaining are the ones you will use to brew your spirits. A typical round is made up of four phase; Market, Distill, Sell and Age phase and players will gain “Spirit” points over the course of seven rounds. Something I really appreciate in this game is that you can always make something, (providing you’ve got the basics) it may not necessarily be the thing you want, but I’d rather take something over nothing any day and it’s still going to net you some money at the very least. The scripts will see you as having the proper number of players and work the same as if you were connected via a network.Disclaimer: I played Distilled online with Tabletop Simulator, so I’m unable to talk about the quality of the components. The way the goals are displayed and figuring out your "path" through them is really fun and adds a nice twist to the gameplay. 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. There are a couple of upgraded levels of pledging that add more content to the game so defiantly look into that if your interested.