You then see which cards you have left in your hand and see which spirit you can make on your clipboard out of the recipes you’ve learned. This may have been down to me not selecting a balanced choice of characters, but it seemed odd that they could be so mismatched.

and the other components, particularly the thick cardboard player mats and spirit label tokens, all work well.As I said earlier, it makes the whole distilling process a little bit more interesting and adds a tension to the game that can lead each player to have their own private little “yay or nay” moments. Distill Phase -Players will attempt to distill a liquid using the ingredients they have collected and added to the washback, add a barrel and claim a spirit label.

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. 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.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. You’re left making some lesser spirit potentially, which in a game as tight as this can feel like a big loss. 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.