Distilled

Distilled spoke to me immediately, since it deals with my other hobby: drinking alcohol. It is an honest card game with appealing, thematic mechanisms, and it knows when not to sacrifice gameplay in the name of theme. Still, its central image remains delightfully specific: I distil vegetables, make firewater, and sell it in nice bottles.

At its core, the game has me build that journey of producing and selling spirits through cards. The theme is not pushed to extremes, but the mechanisms remain thematic enough that I feel I am making something, rather than simply moving abstract symbols from one place to another.

As the game goes on, there is plenty of juice — pun very much intended — without it becoming exhausting. Near the end, everything starts clicking together beautifully: an apparently large lead is not enough on its own, because the final scoring rewards the sensible household manager who planned ahead, rather than the opportunist whose whole philosophy is “everything is vodka.”

I can comfortably recommend it as the main course for a lovely game night. Ideally, I would put it on the table alongside a nice Ardbeg.