Luthier

Two and a half hours on the question of who gets to make the violin.

Dave Beck and Abe Burson's follow-up to Distilled, set in the workshops of eighteenth-century Europe when instrument-making sat somewhere between craft and industry. You are courting patrons — real ones, Bach and Mozart and Beethoven among them — while assembling the wood, varnish and labour to finish instruments that those patrons will actually want. The production is the reason people talk about it: this is a game that looks like the subject it is about.

The engine is hidden bidding welded to worker placement, which is an unusual pairing and the source of most of the tension. You commit to a bid before you know what anyone else wants, and a lost auction is not merely a lost turn, it is a turn your rival now takes. Heavy, long and unapologetic about it — nearer two and a half hours than ninety minutes with four, and the rulebook expects you to have played this sort of thing before.

Perfect for: the group that finished Distilled and immediately asked what else the same people had made.

1–4 players | 90–150 minutes | Age 14+

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📖 New to the style? What is a Worker Placement game? — what the mechanism is, and why it keeps turning up.