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Distilled, a board game about booze, brings a big shot of strategy to the table
01.03.2024 - 20:57 / polygon.com
Distilled, the new board game about making and selling spirits like whiskey and vodka, was among the most played demos at last year’s Gen Con. The multiplayer strategy game, designed and published by Paverson Games, isn’t a drinking game though. Instead, it’s a simulation of the art, science, and economics of making booze — and it couldn’t have been published at a more opportune moment for American drinking culture.
In February of last year, the Distilled Spirits Council estimated that, for the first time ever, consumers in the U.S. were purchasing more hard liquor than beer. It’s a titanic shift in the beverage industry, which has long been dominated by the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Molson Coors, makers of everything from bog-standard Budweiser beer to the more exotic Miller Light. Game designer Dave Beck told Polygon that this shift also coincides with a change in the tabletop industry, where more people than ever are interested in new board games – especially those that lean into their theme as much as this title does.
“There’s nothing on the market about whiskey, gin, or vodka,” Beck said during an interview at the Paverson Games booth last August. “So I wanted to change that by making Distilled, and really wanted to lean heavy into theme.”
The idea, he said, came to him during a recent trip to Scotland. “I was touring lots of distilleries, drinking lots of whiskey, [and] playing lots of board games,” Beck said. “And it came to me one night. I couldn’t sleep, and this idea for a mechanic to represent the distilling process popped into my head.”
The core mechanic of Distilled is simple: Each player purchases ingredients to place into their storeroom, and then uses those ingredients to mix up batches of spirits in their distillation tanks. Batches take the form of small decks of cards, which get shuffled. The Angel’s Share — a portion of a given batch of alcohol lost to evaporation — gets factored in as a single card taken from the pile. Next comes the Devil’s Share — another portion of the batch lost during aging. That causes yet another card to be removed from the pile. What’s left in the pile is the liquor that you’ve actually made. You can add in more expensive ingredients for the chance to end up with more valuable spirits, but there’s always the chance that something goes to waste — just like in actual distillation.
Also in play are a limited number of brand names, which players can snag on a first-come-first-served basis as they go to market. No, Jack Daniels isn’t involved — yet — but the fictional brands all make nods to their real-world counterparts. Once brands are secured by a player, they can go on to pay dividends for their owners by causing even lower-quality booze to be worth a
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