Alcohol cards are added for each sugar, all cards are shuffled, the top and bottom cards are revealed and placed in your supply for future rounds. In this phase you will take turns purchasing items from the market or pay to unlock an extra spirit recipe. It warned me to stop and informed me not to throw away the empty punchboards after popping out the components.

Even the basic ingredients and basic items cost more than I would have guessed given how tight cash is. Once chosen, give each player their starting items based on their distiller and give them their signature recipe token and ingredient and a metal barrel and glass bottle card. While guided by the player-specific goal cards and shared goals all players are racing toward, I found myself just enjoying going through the motions of planning out how I was going to make the current round’s spirit.The removal of the top and bottom card is meant to mimic the angel’s share and the devil’s cut from the distillation process.

It really exposes the game for what it is, and I think if you can play a game and enjoy it on TTS, it’s doing something right. 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. 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. It’s a great game with a lot going for it, and it’s an easy recommendation to anyone who enjoys that Quacks-like mixture of strategy and luck, just with less luck involved.

Players can mitigate the effects of a bad draw off their deck by adding more essential ingredients and ensure they will make the correct spirit at the end of the distilling phase.

You get to choose how many of your ingredients go into your washback (picture a massive bath for mixing it all up), and then you add an alcohol card for every sugar card in your concoction.Because the engine-building in this game is very sparse, if present at all, the seven turns are mostly uniform. One friend of mine who backed the crowdfunding campaign reported that his first five-player game (all new players for their learning game) took FOUR HOURS. This feels off, particularly because having the first choice of a fresh market of cards can be vital. Turning over those top and bottom cards creates a feeling of tension not unlike taking that of risky the extra card in Blackjack, when you’re already at 15. But the game does have slightly more claim to engine-building because of upgrades and asymmetrical bonuses from distillery identities, but actions never really chain into each other or become more useful as the game progresses.