I previously reviewed Distilled for Board Game Grow. I gave it a 4 out of 5 Stars. It is a very enjoyable game with lower player counts.
In my review, I briefly mentioned the Africa and Middle East expansion. This is a more in-depth look at the expansion. If you like Distilled, do you need to buy this expansion? Well sit back, grab a cocktail or not, and find out!
Expansion Overview:
Africa and Middle East add the following to Distilled:
- 6 New Distiller Identity cards (Characters) with each of their Signature Ingredient cards and Recipe Label tokens.
- 3 New Tasting Flight cards (15 total for 3/player)
- 4 New Spirits (each with 5 Spirit Label Tokens for 20 total)
- 10 New Distillery Upgrade cards
- 10 New Premium Market Ingredient cards
- 9 New Premium Market Item cards
- 8 New Flavor cards
- 6 New Distillery Goal cards
- 4 New Solo Goal cards
- 5 New Spirit Award tokens
Game Experience with the Expansion:
Expansions can add new experiences to the game, improve previous experiences, ruin previously good experiences (I am looking at you Nemesis expansions), or just add more variability to the base game. Africa and the Middle East definitely don’t ruin the taste of the original game, it merely adds more flavors… albeit not that many flavors. There are only two new Mechanics and they are not earth-shaking, barely martini-shaking, but they do speed up the game, which is never a bad thing.
• The first is there are now ingredients that count as double sugars, which allows you to distill complicated spirits faster and produce two alcohol.
• The second is the new premium ingredient Glucose Syrup which acts as a wild sugar and the player selects if it is grain, plant, or fruit sugar.
Interestingly despite the game name having two separate geographical locations, the cards are all in the same Region, so there are now four Regions instead of three in the base game. As I mentioned in my original review, we house-ruled that two players can not select identities from the same region. So we were hoping this was going to add two new regions. If you follow the original rules, this decreases the odds that you select the same region by only one. Because it is a new region, it allows a change in scoring for bottle collection, if you own a bottle from all four regions you now get 8 spirit points, while if you only collect three you still get 5 Spirit points.
Final Thoughts:
I really enjoyed Distilled and this expansion gives more variability to the game and speeds the game up. For lovers of this game, it is an easy decision to grab this expansion and for fans of math, this expansion with one additional region is priced at $22 while the base game with three regions is $66, so the math works out. For those that will play the game fewer than 10 times, it is probably not worth it and for those that think this should have just been included in the base game as it does not change the game, you are also correct and might not want to buy this expansion.
Hits:
• New cards all improve the variability and replayability of the game
• New cards and mechanisms speed up the game
• Fits in the original box and just shuffles into the base game
Misses:
• No significant changes or improvements to the game
• Adds only one region
