Sky Team Review – Trust, Turbulence, and the Joy of Landing

Even though I live and grew up in Australia, half of my family lives in Canada. So I have many memories of long 18-hour flights. Where to save my brother and I from boredom, flight attendants would invite us into the cockpit to see the pilots at work.

I remember the overwhelming flashing lights, displays, and buttons on the surrounding walls. Now, Sky Team doesn’t have anywhere near that amount. But it has enough to give you the feeling that there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it all.

How to play

After everyone, including the pilot, ate the fish it’s fallen on your shoulders to land the plane. Starting 6000 feet in the sky, every round moves you 1000 feet closer to the runway. Before you make contact, you must deploy the landing gear, open the flaps, and slow down the plane.

Starting each round, you and your co-pilot roll four dice a piece. Then you take turns placing these dice one at a time on the different spaces around the board.

Each space has requirements and a special effect to help you avoid the many, many ways you can lose the game.

For instance, the Radio space lets you communicate with other planes on your flight path. Asking them kindly, if not hurriedly, to move out of the way.

The Landing Gear (only activatable by the pilot) and Flaps (co-pilot) spaces slow down the plane in preparation for landing.

Most importantly, the Engines and Axis spaces require you and your co-pilot to each place one die in their spaces every round.

The Axis space determines the plane’s tilt, where the angle changes depending on the difference between the two placed dice. A positive difference tilts the plane to the left, while a negative difference tilts the plane to the right.

Meanwhile, the sum of the two dice placed in the Engines spaces translates into speed. Depending on the size of the sum, the plane can move 0, 1 or 2 spaces towards the runway.

Any left-over dice can be used for a nice coffee break. Because apparently, there’s no better time to have a cuppa than when you’re hurtling from the sky in a metal tube.

As mentioned, Sky Team has many, many loss conditions you need to keep on top of to land safely. Including:

• Running into another plane by not clearing them out with the Radio
• Overshooting the runway by going too slow
• Not slowing down on the runway by having more speed than your brakes can handle
• Not having all four Flaps up
• Not having all three Landing Gears deployed
• Going into a spin by tilting the angle of your plane beyond safe parameters

Now, even though this is a lot to keep track of, like the buttons and dials in an actual cockpit, it’s all visual. So understanding where you’re at and how you’re likely to lose is quite digestible.

If you manage to avoid all of these loss conditions and land successfully on the runway, then prepare to meet the local news team. You’ve just won the game.

Communication gets dicey at a mile-high

In addition to the overview above, there’s one more rule I’ve yet to cover. Once both players roll their dice, you may only communicate through deep sighs, puzzled looks and smiling eyes.

So while verbal communication is off the table, you can still give hints by placing your dice.

When dealing with an emergency, like running into a plane, you want to play a die to the Radio spot quickly to let your partner know you’ve got this.

Otherwise, if you rolled horrendously on all four of your dice. You want to place your dice first in the Axis and Engines spaces to let them know that your dice have failed you. Please deal with it!

This conversation results in a back-and-forth between the players with each die placement. Both of you are trying to make the best decisions with the information you have, relying on your partner to fill in the gaps. In doing so, you’re making more assumptions than a conspiracy theorist.

I like this metaphor because Sky Team also makes you paranoid.

Especially when it comes to the re-roll tokens.

These are rarely earned, but in desperate situations either player can reach for them and let both players re-roll all of their dice.

Frequently, when looking at the board and the dice you rolled, you see a dire situation with no clear way of getting out. In these cases, it’s tempting to use the re-roll token. But usually unneeded, as a little trust in your co-pilot goes a long way to bailing you out of your bad situation.

This reliance on trust and hoping your co-pilot can resolve a sticky situation is what separates Sky Team from other cooperative board games like Pandemic or Forbidden Jungle . Which rely more heavily on strategic discussion.

Thematically this works, as I imagine this trusting symbiosis is required in a real-life cockpit. Likewise, and as an aside, I also think the board of switches and dials works thematically.

However, this style of trust-based gameplay relies heavily on non-verbal communication. Giving Sky Team a completely different feel to other board games. If you can’t connect with this style of play, which some of the people I played with didn’t, then you’re going to bounce off quickly.

Wrong difficulty

I might be telling on my wife and I but it took us a few games before we got the feel of Sky Team and landed the plane successfully.

That was a great moment for us because we’re normally pretty good with cooperative games. To be defeated on our first flight was a wake-up call about the dangers of flying without a pilot license.

Once we had figured out how to land the plane we opened the Flight Log, or scenarios booklet, and realised there was so much more to Sky Team than we first imagined. Nine different mixed and matched modules create 22 different scenarios for you to beat.

They’re ranked from Routine Landings to Heroic Landings to everything in between.

Now, the Routine Landings were great for introducing new modules like having to look after your fuel supply and training your interns. However, they all felt too similar. You’d deal with whatever additional problem was added, and then return to landing the plane as usual.

It wasn’t until we started the Exceptional Conditions scenarios that Sky Team rekindled the challenge and excitement we felt from the first few games we played.

Unfortunately, there are six scenarios before you get to this new level of landings. By the time we reached them, we were bored of the Routine Landings’ lack of challenge. So I suggest you only do one or two, before jumping straight to the next level.

Overall, Sky Team is an interesting two-player challenge that was a hit with most people I played with. Even though working my way through the Flight Log was tiresome, the highs of the first landing, and the Exceptional Conditions, were incredibly fun.