Solotober continues with Distilled!
A Spirited strategy game for the spooky season.
This October I’d like to celebrate a few of my favorite games I’ve played solo recently. (I’d also like to talk about my upcoming game PONDUS, which launches on Kickstarter October 17th. but more on that later)
Today’s solo adventure?
Distilled by Dave Beck (solo by David Digby) and published by Paverson Games
In Distilled (solo) the player is tasked with running a distillery by accomplishing a series of goals and scoring higher than the goals you’ve accomplished. (there’s little numbers on those goals)
You may have noticed on most of my social bios, I call myself a ‘Fermentation Wizard’. This is because I used to be a distiller! I worked for a small craft distillery in upstate NY for a few years making award winning Whiskey (with an e), Bourbon, Gin, and Brandy (along with a few other experiments like cider and an oat whiskey!) I’m very familiar with the distillation process and I have to say, this game does one hell of a job being thematically accurate.
SETUP:
This game takes up some table space, even in the solo mode. The biggest portion is the Market. (You need room for a 7x4 tableau of cards just for the market cards) You’ll need a player board, a recipe card and the score board. As you can see here, it takes up my entire coffee table. This is a big game when you include even more players!
Select a recipe card (there’s a color and a small letter that differentiate each one) and a distiller identity based on the options your recipe card gives you. For this game I’ve selected Sakai Sōtarō (sah-kah-EE soh-tah-row).
He specializes in Ōtsu-rui Shōchū (Oh-ts-you-roo-EE show-chew). Shōchū is kind of Japan’s version of moonshine. It’s made with a variety of sugar sources and is sometimes distilled several times before it moves to an aging stage or is bottled. In this case, my character’s signature drink is a Shōchū made with Buck Wheat and is distilled only one time in a Pot Still. (the more you distill a spirit, the fewer flavor compounds stick around, this is distilled once, so the wheat flavor is more prominent!) He ages his Shōchū in a clay barrel. (so I should look out for those while I play!
Lastly we’ll setup the goal cards unique to the solo mode. Arranged in a diamond shape, we will work our way up a path of goal cards trying to outscore the ones we accomplish. Each round we will attempt to make an award winning spirit. Sometimes that goes to plan, other times it does not. Let’s begin!
GAMEPLAY:
Distilled is played over 7 rounds with each round having 6 phases.
Phase 1 - Start up.
There may be cards on your player board that have a ‘power’ button symbol. We first activate all of these in any order we choose. For my guy we gain 1 money.
Phase 2 - The Market.
We can purchase a number of products from the market of cards that are face up. There is a slight division among the cards. The bottom row is the ‘Basic Market’ and I can only purchase 2 of these cards per market phase. The top row of the ‘Premium Market’ are distillery upgrades. Usually passive effects for you. The middle row is premium ingredients. Using these in your spirit runs cost a little more, but will result in a higher scoring product. The bottom row is premium items. These are the bottles you sell your spirit in (for more money and points) and the barrels you can use to age your spirits (also for more money and points).
Once you’ve bought all you can/want there’s a market clean up stage. You’ll reference a small stack of cards that will simulate other players picking from the market. They’ll get discarded into the truck that’s off to the side of the market, slide the cards left to the right and refill until the market is full again.
Phase 3 - Distillation.
You’ll now have a number of cards in your ‘Pantry’. To distill a spirit, we need to play a number of cards into the ‘Washback’ area (just left of our player board). We need at least 1 yeast, 1 sugar, and 1 water. But to properly make the spirits you want, we will want to add more cards to this area. We’ll add 1 alcohol card for every sugar in the washback. Then we’ll shuffle all the cards in the washback area. We’ll remove the top and bottom cards and place them back in our pantry.
The cards that remain in our washback stack is our spirit. We’ll see what options are available to us on our recipe card and we’ll add a barrel to this stack. (some barrels let us age for a turn or more and some allow us to sell the spirit right away, each spirit recipe will be different)
Phase 4 - Selling Time.
Now that we’ve made a spirit, if we’re not aging it, we’re selling it. When you sell a spirit, you’ll need to add a bottle from your storeroom (this is the area on your player board where you store unused barrels and bottles). You’ll score points (bottom left of cards) and earn money (top left of cards) on the cards in your spirit stack. Once you’ve done these calculations, you’ll discard all the cards in the stack. (You throw them away onto the truck if they’re premium items, or just stack them on the piles in the basic market)
Phase 5 - Aging Time.
If we’re aging a spirit, we’ll place it in the warehouse area of our player board. And then we’ll place a random flavor card on the bottom of each stack of cards we have in our warehouse. (you can age multiple spirits at the same time)
Phase 6 - End of Round reset.
This is just a clean up phase. We will check to see if we accomplished any goals. As we accomplish goals, we’ll flip over the cards in the row above that touch the goal we just achieved. (Some goal cards will earn us extra points and money!)
We’ll also ‘hold a tasting’ if we didn’t sell a spirit this round. This gives us some money by selling points for the next round on turns where we aged a spirit instead of selling one.
THE RESULTS OF MY PLAYTHROUGH:
This is the track I took while playing. I managed to make Moonshine, Vodka, Shochu, and my character’s signature recipe. I ended up with 97 points. The solo goal cards wanted me to score more than 75 points which I did! I’m on a winning streak! This playthrough took me about 120 minutes to setup and play.
As a game designer, I’m constantly learning from my coworkers in the scene, and so I try and play as many games as I can afford to! I have a particular interest in making games that provide a great solo experience and I try to take away a lesson or two from each game I play, even if the solo mode wasn’t the original intention of the game.
Lessons learned from Distilled:
The theme of this game is so beautifully intertwined with the game mechanics. I love how simple the rounds are. Buy ingredients, Make a spirit, Sell it or Age it, rinse and repeat. It’s easy to teach and pick up on. I also love how accurate they managed to make the spirit making process. (My favorite touch is discarding the top and bottom cards from the backwash process, a reference to the distiller’s cut which happens at the beginning and end of a spirit run)
It is quite the game to setup for any player count. It runs really long with more than 3 people. The steps in a turn are simple, but because there’s so many options in the market, some players freeze up. (We call this analysis paralysis. Happens to us all.) It’s also quite the table hog. Managing this many cards at once is not a space saving mechanic. Even if it is fun and allows for a large pool of cards to make decisions with. It feels like you’re more in control with this many options. I’m not sure that control feeling would still be there if there were only 2 options out for each category. It’s a tricky situation.
You can tell a lot of thought and care went into this game and it really shows. There are quite a few moving pieces that make every game different and interesting. The game ends on a great note, you walk away wishing you had just 1 more turn. The little engine you build really ramps up on that last turn.
This game has over 300 cards in it. It’s mostly cards with a few sheets of cardboard tokens and player boards. There are some nice wood tokens and cubes. It’s a big box, most of the box is plastic storage containers.
I paid $55 for this game on Kickstarter back in July 2021. (plus shipping)
My game PONDUS is launching October 17th on Kickstarter during their Witchstarter event. You can follow the campaign by clicking this link. Over the next few weeks, I hope to show you a little more about the game.
Distilled has over 300 cards. PONDUS has 84 cards. Distilled is in a roughly 12x12x4in classic 2 piece box. PONDUS is in a roughly 4x8x1in box. (about the size of a Tiny Epic game box if you have one of those around). (And if all goes well, the PONDUS box will have a magnetic closure and look kind of like a book) PONDUS is a portable game for 1 to 4 players. It features over 80 cards and 40 hex tiles to explore as you hunt for the Orbs of Power.
I’ve played quite a few table hogging games lately and my goal with PONDUS is to reign in the game-spreading that is common in many games these days. I’m putting together a pretty prototype soon to show off. In the mean time here’s a rough look at all of the components in the game:
One of the stretch goals for the Kickstarter campaign is to upgrade the player components from cardboard to wooden pieces. (We’re also working on an expansion that would add 5-6 players and twice as many cards found in the base game.)
We’re still getting quotes back from the manufacturer (should be in soon) but we’re aiming for a $30-35 MSRP. Kickstarter backers will get the game for a $5 discount.($25 + shipping, fingers crossed!)
Thank you so much for joining me today. I’d love to hear your suggestions on what game I should play next. Until next time.