This is the Stretch Goal Announcement where we THANK YOU, the Backers! 🙏
over 4 years ago – Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 11:58:31 PM

5,000 BACKERS?!? 🙀

That's a big number! Almost as big as... 

Crossing over into the $380K stretch goal earlier today, we've now unlocked the optional add-on for metal recipe cubes. These will provide a real sense of weight to the game (no pun intended), in three different colors of bronze, silver, and gold. For just $12, you'll have 37 metal cubes that will not cost any additional money to ship if you add them to your pledge.

Note: you cannot add them to your pledge yet, but you will be able to do so after the campaign, in the pledge manager (more details on how that works later, as there is no rush). 

So, here we are. FIVE DAYS LEFT in the campaign.

It's time to do one final lap of "thank you" stretch goals! These are just for you - the backers - for getting us this far. Rather than putting down three separate 20K stretch goals, we've crammed them all in to one single 20K stretch goal, for when we reach that major milestone of $400,000!

Since we're nearing the end of the campaign, we wanted to do one final "thank-you" in the form of cool bonuses that have popped up as ideas during the campaign, some of which have come from you, the backers! I'm going to outline each of these bonuses below, in detail.  Note: these three thank-you-goals will be available for all backers (details in each of the below breakdowns).

After we announced the Flavor votes in a previous update, we had a lot of people wishing that "their flavor" had made it into the game. We had at least one Distiller suggest that it would be cool to have some blank Flavor cards. What a great idea! Now, you'll be able to customize your Distilled experience with four additional cards, and be added to the 14-card mini expansion. These can just be unused and blank forever in your box, combined with the current flavors, or replace four current flavors if you'd like! We will be including one blank card for each of the four sell values in every game of Distilled ($0/1/2/3). We can't wait to see what you all come up with, and we hope you'll post your titles, sketches, and flavor notes on our Facebook and BGG community when that time comes! When we reach $400K, these will be added to Distilled's FREE 14-card mini expansion, so our Original, Signature, and PnP backers will have four blank cards to have fun with! Note: As a reminder, the mini-expansion will not be found in the retail game, and only obtainable in limited quantities after the campaign (while supplies last).

Remember back when we reached $150,000 and we unlocked a new "Master Distiller Winner Component"? Well, that allowed us to have a component - likely the backside of the first player token - to be a bragging component that you will get to place by your distillery player board at the end of the game if you were the winner (the Master Distiller). This was a fun little addition to the game, especially for those who might want to snap a pic of their board for social media and brag about their win ;)

But when we got into the $300K's and above, we realized it was time to upgrade a component as a big thank-you gift to all of you. So, if we reach $400K, all Original and Signature Blend backers will receive a thick metal commemorative coin to use as your First Player Marker and Master Distiller Medal for free. You will be able to add-on additional coins in the Pledge Manager as well if you want to get them for your friends ;)

The concept of the coin will be inspired both by spirit awards (above) and also by the challenge coin (below). The World Spirits Competition is famous for giving out various medals in Bronze, Silver, Gold, Double Gold, and Platinum. Given to the best spirits of the year, these clearly represent victory and prestige, worthy of possession by the Master Distiller in our game. Challenge coins are often found in the armed forces and other organizations, but also have a great history in the spirits business as well, including bartenders, distilleries, and even YouTube channels (one of my favorites, Aqvavitae, was one of the first to start the challenge coin trend in this space). 

These cast metal coins will measure roughly 2" in diameter (conveniently the size of a Glencairn class rim!). Perhaps some of you will carry these in your pocket, flash it at a convention to challenge someone to buy them a whisky, or even let the winner carry it in their pocket until the next game of Distilled in your local game group. Either way, when we hit $400K, it will be something all Original and Signature Blenders will receive for FREE, as our core group of Distillers! Note: This will not be found in the retail game (or the PnP!), and only obtainable in limited quantities after the campaign (while supplies last).

Okay, this is exciting stuff. You know how we have unlocked 15 different spirits to make in the base game alone? That's a LOT of different spirits and recipe lists! But some of you have asked about specific spirits, and whether they are going to be included in the game. As you can imagine, we can't include EVERY spirit in the world in the box, but we can most definitely give you the tools to help us reach that goal on your own. 

We want to put the power of customizing Distilled into your hands. Want to create a spirit from some part of the world that currently doesn't exist in the game? Well, once we hit $400K, this could become a reality. When we hit $400K, we will be commissioning Seth Berrier, our digital demigod of Distilled, to create a website that will allow you to generate and print out new spirits and recipe lists on your own (Seth is who helped make the killer Tabletop Simulator mod, along with helping with the Tabletopia mod).

Right now, our vision for this is two-fold:

• You'll be able to design and create a brand new spirit that would include its title, region,  as well as required ingredients/age/barrel, and spirit point amounts. Perhaps this is Rhum Agricole from the Americas, Slovovitz from Europe, or Arrack from Asia. You'll enter in the values and it will spit out a label and recipe that you will be able to print off and use in your game. While it won't have amazing artwork by Erik, it will have all iconography and formatting to blend in well with Distilled's presentation.
• Whether you decide to get creative with your own spirit inventions or not, you'll also have a chance to "mix and match" current spirit recipes in the game to create new recipe list combinations (perhaps  including that Slovovitz you just created!). Remember, we'll be including multiple curated "tasting flights" that you'll be able to choose from, but if you want to seek out new combinations of existing and/or created spirits, this will let you pursue that as well through "fan made flights". 

Now, this might all seem confusing, overwhelming, or just plain useless to you. That's okay! This is something that won't be available until the game is released next year, and will likely only be for those who want to dive deeper than the 15 spirit recipes included in the base game. For many of you, this won't pertain to your experience, but for some of you we hope that this is a game changer (literally...ha!).

For those who are excited about this, feel free to head over to BGG to start talking about what some of those spirit recipes might be! Who knows, maybe some of the best fan-made flights and spirits might end up in a future expansion or game ;) Note: this will be available to the entire Distilled community, since it will exist as a free, public website. This means it will support both physical and PnP versions of the game, and extend Distilled's mission of being accessible and inclusive even further around the world!

This last one isn't part of the stretch goal, but instead another response to you - our amazing fans, and is available now (and free!). One of our backers, Thomas, reached out to me about acquiring the Distilled "D", as he wanted to try etching it into a snifter. I thought that was a great idea, and the result was really cool (see below). We've had a few other Distillers asking about the file, so I'm happy to say that you can all now access the Distilled "D" file here: by downloading this file, you are agreeing that you will only download it for personal use. I can't wait to see what some of you come up with, and where the "D" will show up next!

Whew! Well, I hope that by reading through all of this, you see how thankful we are for each and every one of you, and your support for this project. We've tried to come up with these celebratory stretch goals in our final week as a way to show our appreciation for coming along on this amazing ride with us,  (that frankly is already out of this earth's atmosphere, way past the moon, and likely headed to Jupiter, Mars or some other distant planet!). 

Sláinte,

Dave

PS. Did you see that Distilled's Kickstarter campaign was ranked #1 by both the Dice Tower and Thinker Themer this week?

PPS. Earlier this week, a great article was written by Dan Hess of Quackalope, in which he pairs great spirits with game experiences. He wrote up a fantastic piece about Distilled. Follow this link to read the full article.

Distilled Flavor Votes are in! What's Best? 😋 What's Worst? 🤢
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 23, 2021 at 12:58:10 AM

The flavor votes are tallied and we have our top picks! 🏆 

As a reminder, we said that we will feature the Top 10 most popular flavors, as voted by you, in the game! A few things, by the numbers, before we dive deeper:

• Total number of participating voters: 1,399
• Total number of flavors voted on: 84 
• Most popular flavor: Caramel (1,021 votes, 72.8% of the votes)
• Least popular flavor: Tireburn (76 votes, 5.4% of the votes)

As you can see above, there was a fairly gradual slope from best to worst as it dwindled in popularity.  In looking through the results, it appears that people definitely leaned towards flavors that would taste good, rather than ones that might be funny,  or taste bad. And that's just fine - you voted with your preferences, and now we have some delicious flavors to add to Distilled! So, without delay, here are your top 10 flavors for Distilled, which we will be officially adding to the game:

 Top 10 Fan Voted Flavors for Distilled 🥇

• Caramel
• Oaky
• Orange Peel
• Maple
• Spicy
• Cherry
• Nutty
• Fruity
• Ginger
• Berries

But I'm sure you want to know how each and every flavor ranked, especially the bottom 10! At the end of this update, you are welcome to view the entire spreadsheet from the survey results. If any of you are stat and graph wizards, I welcome any sorts of visual presentations that communicates things in a better or more interesting way! So, what were the ickiest flavors of all, you ask? 

10 Least Popular Fan Voted Flavors for Distilled 🤮

•  Tireburn
• Glue
• Sports Bag
• Plastic
• Gravy
• Asparagus
• Marmite
• Band-aid
• Sweaty

I'll tell you right now, I probably will still be taking a few of these lower-ranked flavors and adding them to the Flavor deck. Remember, we have 40 in the base game, and an extra 8 more in the expansion, so we definitely have some room to have fun, since we have a handful of undesirable flavors in the deck! Most importantly, I want to see Erik draw things like Band-aid and Sports Bag! 🤣 (believe it or not, but "band-aid" is a positive flavor often attributed to a nice single malt!)

If you're curious to see how each flavor fared, head over to the master spreadsheet to dig a bit deeper (pro-tip, you can "File > Make a Copy" of it if you wanted to play around with it on your own).

Thanks again everyone, and hopefully I'll be in touch soon with another update!

Sláinte,

Dave

Grab Your Popcorn 'n' Whisky - Time to Enjoy the Stretch Goal Show!
over 4 years ago – Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 07:02:27 PM

It's Time to Be Honest

Okay Distillers, I want to let you in on a little (likely obvious) secret.  We hadn't planned for many of the last 10 or so stretch goals. I mean, we talked about them, but more in the sense of "wouldn't it be cool if we raised like $200,000 and could do these super cool extra things?". As I've said before, I wasn't even sure if we'd hit $100K by the end of the campaign.

So, when we raised over $100K in the first day, we quickly brought back all those dream stretch goals! We brought the neoprene mat and shot glass add-ons back, added extra spirits and distiller identities, and realized that the dual-layered recipe clipboards might become a reality. Those all added a lot of cost, cards and components to the game, but knew they would be appreciated by fans, which is what is most important to us. And thanks to all of you, we were able to include those (and much more!) in the game.

But now that we've hit $300K, it's the wild, wild west. 

What you're going to see - for stretch goals during the rest of the campaign - are ideas we've brainstormed during the campaign in order to give back to all of you. We want to show our appreciation and thanks for helping us realize our dream. So sit back, grab some popcorn (or maybe some whisky) and get ready to help us unlock these new ideas by spreading the Distilled gospel!

The Next $100K & The Next 3 Stretch Goals

The next three stretch goals will bring us closer to that $400K mark, and are meant to be savored by multiple senses, just like a fine single malt whisky. No, we won't be including a free bottle of scotch in your game and no, this won't come with scratch 'n' sniff flavor cards, but we are hoping these gifts will still satiate the sounds, sights, and tactile quality of Distilled!

I'm a huge fan of ambient sound for my board games. My friends and gaming groups know that I always have thematic music playlists queued up - and sometimes even sound effects - when playing games at my house. I use two different channels for this, but my all-time favorite is Tabletop Audio. The tracks are professionally composed to have subtle, ambient music coupled with unique background sound effects to fit the theme. If you haven't heard of them before, I encourage you to hop over to their site, and maybe even support them via Patreon like I am, where you get access to even more tracks!

I'm thrilled to announce that if we reach $340K, we will be commissioning Tim at Tabletop Audio to compose custom audio tracks specifically for Distilled! This will involve multiple tracks, likely focusing on different regions or areas of the world in Distilled, while also incorporating sound effects one might find in a distillery or other spirits-related industries. While these will be free and available on the website for the world to enjoy, all backers will be able to download bonus tracks that will have music and sound effects separated, for further flexibility.

By the way, my other go-to music site for board games is Melodice, which accesses user-created YouTube playlists - type in your favorite board game and boom, you have a long list of auto-shuffled instrumental songs to play in the background that matches your game's theme! Check out (and please add to!) Distilled's Melodice playlist here.

First sounds, now sights! I hope you'll all agree, Erik's Distillery Player Board illustration is truly a work of art. It functions as your dashboard or playmat, but also helps you to feel like you are looking into your own distillery, as if it were a dollhouse right in front of you. Currently, all the distillery player boards are exactly the same. But what if they weren't?

I still remember when Frank West brought out this stretch goal in Isle of Cats, where each player board would have a unique animal swimming alongside the ship. I thought that was so very cool and unique, and realized that we could do something like that with Distilled as well! As you can imagine, gorgeous illustrations like this don't come cheap, and we can only do this thanks to all of your help. If we hit $360K, we'll commission Erik to make each distillery player board unique, mainly through different still designs on each board, and perhaps other little props here and there. This will also allow him to find ways to denote each player's color as associated with their player board too, and perhaps this will allow us to seal the deal on the scoring markers being unique still shapes, matching their player board! It is all coming together nicely, eh?

Some of you have asked for it, and now you'll have Metal Recipe Cubes as an optional add-on! Due to this adding weight to the game, we wanted to make this one an optional add-on for anyone looking to deluxe-a-fy Distilled even more! We're going to be providing these to you for $12.  Solid metal cubes are fairly expensive to manufacture, so these won't be a profit opportunity for us, but instead just enough to cover manufacturing costs and any added shipping costs involved with this extra weight for those who choose to add this on. Note: this will be an add-on available in the pledge manager after the campaign is over, so you don't have to do anything right now. All pledges will still receive the wooden recipe tokens, even if you choose this metal cube add-on.

So there you have it - this is the start of our home "stretch-goal" stretch, and I hope you're as excited as I am about how these things will make Distilled even more special, for both you as the backer as well as future players and fans who don't even know about it yet!

Which one of these three stretch goals are you most excited for? Leave your feedback in the main comment page, and maybe even talk about ideas you might have for the audio and visual elements of enhancing Distilled!

Sláinte,

Dave

PS. I failed to announce - for our Print 'n' Players - that we now have the Africa & Middle East Expansion available as a PnP add-on for just $3! Feel free to manager your pledge and update that accordingly.

PPS.  The Flavor Survey was a HIT! We have had over 1,300 responses so far, and the survey is open until the end of the day on Tuesday. So if you haven't voted yet, get thee to the survey link found in Backers-Only Update #6! I'll plan to send an update to everyone shortly thereafter with all vote totals, which should be interesting!

PPPS. I wanted to once again invite all of you to our Facebook Community, where we talk about games, spirits, and many other things. Usually every Wednesday, I do a "Whisk(e)y Wednesday w/ Dave" where I livestream updates, interviews, and other things to that community. If you're on Facebook, feel free to join our nearly 1,500-strong community of Distillers!

Live Playthrough Today w/ Gaming Rules!, New Shipping Updates, and QUACK! 🦆
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 09:58:53 PM

Does that number say 4️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Backers?!? 

I still can't believe this. It's like a dream for me, and you're all to thank for making it not only come true, but exceed all possible expectations by about $200,000! 🙏😆

First off, we unlocked another stretch goal, and we're headed to the next as well! These stretch goals will solely support our Africa & Middle East Expansion, with a new spirit called Grogue, that hails from Cape Verde (off the west coast of Africa). While many of you might know Grogue as the little green guy who hangs out with a bounty hunter, this bevvie was around long before that! In Distilled, you can make the rum-like Grogue with sugarcane or another plant, and it can be aged in a clay or wood barrel - that's right, in the expansion, some spirits can be aged in either barrel type! We're well on our way to unlocking some cool new upgrades, barrels, and flavors as well, at the $300K mark!

I'm quite excited about this update, as I've got some things for you to watch and some great news for some of our backers, regarding shipping! In this update, you'll find:

• A link to a live playthrough happening TODAY
• Discounts for local pickup and multiple-copy shipping 
• A quack-tastic video that was published yesterday, that you can watch immediately!

LIVE Playthrough by Gaming Rules! TODAY!

Paul Grogan, of Gaming Rules! will be streaming a 3-player game of Distilled today! He's got a physical copy and has been spending some time learning to play the game, so I'm excited to see how things go for him. Paul is based in the UK, so while it will be evening for him, it will be 3:00pm EDT here in the States. I hope you'll be able to tune in and comment in the chat - I'll be there answering questions and correcting Paul if he makes any flubs ;)

Be sure to tune in via this link today at 3pm Eastern to watch Paul play Distilled!

Discounts on Shipping: Local Pickup & Bulk Pricing!

These weren't present at the start of the campaign, as I didn't realize so many people would come out of the woodwork asking about it. Again, thanks to those who inquired, I now have some good news! 

First, for those interested in shipping more than 1-2 games to a single location, I'm happy to report that it will just cost an additional $7 to ship each copy, up to 4 total, to the same destination! For instance, if you wanted to ship 4 Signature Blend pledges to Australia, it would cost:

$40 USD to ship the first Signature Blend, and then $7 for each additional game, totaling $61 to ship four games to the same address in Australia. In this scenario, you would see the cost change from $40 per game for shipping to just $15.25 per game to ship to Australia! Note: If you wanted to send 5 games, it would trigger a new $40 shipping cost. To get the most for your money you'll want to ship in quantities of 4.

Additionally, I'm happy to report that anyone who wishes to pick their game up locally may now do so, for only $5 (you would choose this in the Pledge Manager after the campaign). It costs quite a great amount of money to ship a pallet of games to my house, but it allows me to pass the savings on to you by shipping so many in bulk. I live about an hour outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul and would coordinate a few days and events where you could pick the game up from me during those allotted times. 

Finally, I'm also happy to report that the countries we cannot ship to has been edited to be more ship-friendly, and we have reduced from 21 to 11 countries on this "we do not ship to" list!

QUACK! (🦆📺)

Finally, I'm thrilled to share this fantastic video with you, by one of my favorite content creators! Jesse not only loves bourbon, but has been a strong supporter of Distilled for awhile now, having played it with me on Tabletop Simulator months ago, and connected me with some great people. I owe a lot to Jesse, and want to thank him for his support and believing in me. Watch the below video for Quackalope's take on why you made the right decision to back Distilled!

Also, do you want to see an inebriated, alcohol-infused playthrough of Distilled on their channel? If so, be sure to comment on their video link here to let them know you'd watch it, as they are planning to do it if they get enough comments! 🥃🍸

Until next time Distillers - Sláinte!

Dave

Distilled Flavor Survey - for Backers' Eyes only! 👀
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 05:07:39 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.