As abstracted as the mechanics are, Sky Team’s plastic Airplane Axis dial is fun to twist and makes you feel like you’re doing the thing!
In Sky Team, you and a partner play as a pilot and co-pilot of a commercial airliner. All that’s asked of you is to land the plane safely. Sounds simple enough, right? The mechanics are also straightforward: each player secretly rolls four dice and takes turns placing the dice onto a control panel to manipulate the cockpit controls.
Each round, both players need to input a dice into the Engines and the Axis to control the speed and steer the plane. The Engine dice determine how quickly you approach the airport, and too much or too little speed could make you miss the runway. The Axis dice determine how much the plane turns. If one Axis dice is higher than the other, the plane will roll; too much will put it into a game-ending spin.
Sky Team’s brilliant trick is that you can’t speak to each other, and you don’t know what dice the other person has. And that’s where the challenge lies. You must communicate through the order you place dice. When possible, you’ve got to place dice that help your co-player, and conversely, it’s better to place undesirable dice early in the round so the other player has plenty of time to react.
The other dice are used for all other landing controls. The pilot must deploy the landing gear and engage the brakes, while the co-pilot must activate the wing flaps. Each input requires placing specific dice values, sometimes even sequentially.
Each round, the plane will drop in altitude. But your speed (controlled by your Engine dice) determines how quickly you reach the airport. To land safely, you must fully engage your landing gear and flaps, your plane must be level, and you must reach the airport at the same time your altitude reaches ground level. You must also reduce your speed (the two-dice result of your Engine dice) to below your brake value, which, depending on how well the pilot was able to prepare the brakes, could be as high as six or as low as two.
As you can see, there’s a lot to do to make a safe landing, and there aren’t a lot of turns to do it. That, the hidden information, and the limits to communication drive the game’s tension, and it does get tense! But the thing that makes it so much fun is just how evocative the whole experience is. The gameboard is a great representation of cockpit controls and its tactile components really enhance the experience. There are lots of little switches to slide, which reveal a satisfying green light when one is toggled. The plastic Airplane Axis dial is also fun to twist as your plane rolls from side to side. As abstracted as the mechanics are, they make you feel like you’re doing the thing.
Sky Team includes 21 different scenarios, offering escalating difficulty and new mechanical twists. Some require turns on the approach. Some will test the limits of your fuel. Some approaches are windy or crowded with air traffic, and some runways are icy. Some approaches must even be played out in real-time!
My wife and I play a lot of board games, and co-ops are our favourites. There must be a lot of couples out there like us, because this two-player-only cooperative game was constantly sold out when it was first released. Does Sky Team live up to the hype? Absolutely. It has a pile of accolades to its name, and it still gets cited as a top two-player co-op. There’s a lot of game in this small and reasonably priced package. If you have a partner you like to play co-ops with, or you play a lot of two-player games, Sky Team is right up your runway.
Review by Lyle Lowery
It’s fast, fun and tense – with components and rules that work together to make you feel like you’re really landing a plane.
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