Distilled: Cocktails

There have been other expansions for Paverson Games' Distilled but the previous expansions have been small beer in comparison with Cocktails. Designed by Dave Beck and Richard Woods, Cocktails comes in a large box, so much so that you might inititally think it's a standalone game. It isn't: you need the original game to play it.

As you might expect, Cocktails give us a lot more cards. There are new characters (both distillers and collectors), new recipes, new bottles, new goals, and of course there are many new premium ingredients: you can't make Malibu without cracking coconuts! The new ingredients also introduce a new mechanic, giving a discount to other cards that are adjacent in the market display. The game also introduces a mechanism for thinning the market display to cycle through the draw deck: much needed with all the new cards from this expansion (and needed even moreso if you've also added in the smaller Africa and Cask Strength expansions). Mind you - this new card discard mechanic encourages 'take that' interactions as players wipe the market of cards they know that an opponent needs...

There's an additional set collection element to the game in using the spirits you make in conjunction with various fruits, decorative umbrellas and the like to mix the eponymous cocktails, with these mixer ingredients added by rolling custom six-sided dice in a cocktail shaker. But it's not the cocktail shaker and glasses or the new cards and their manipulation that are the most significant changes heralded by the Cocktails expansion. Cocktails introduces an add-on to players' individual boards that can be used to increase your warehouse space or to facilitate the production and processing of two spirits on the same turn. You have to pay to open up this additional functionality, and the price rises with each use, but, used judiciously, this can be an effective way of generating the funds you need to tide you over while your warehouse is aging a spirit.

The expansion also introduces an additional central board showing a world map. Whenever you pour a cocktail you get to place a marker spreading out from your distillery location to indicate your distillery's growing reputation. Progress on the map earns players bonus resources and area-control style victory points and points multipliers.

Some board game expansions just give players more of the same, others mainly fix errors, omissions or shortcomings in a base game. Many add layers of complexity that spoil the original. Cocktails avoids these traps, not least because you can take an incremental approach to introducing the new elements: you don't have to include them all at once. And even playing with all the Cocktails additions Distilled remains an accessible medium-weight eurogame. Tho' Cocktails opens up more strategies for playing Distilled and racking up high scores, it manages to do so without bogging players down with too many fiddly new rules and it certainly doesn't dilute the thematic flavour of the original game. Just be warned, combining all the new elements of Cocktails makes Distilled more of a table hog - so less room for your actual drinks!

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