Is There Anyone On Board That Knows How To Fly A Plane? – A Sky Team Review

Wow, what a game Sky Team is. I’m normally a pretty calm, cool, collected person so it takes a good push to get my pulse racing. This is handy for my medical background but, based on the adrenaline coursing through my body during just the base scenario, Sky Team has made it abundantly clear to me that I am not cut out to be a pilot. I do appreciate a game that helps me figure out something useful like that.

I’ll do the abbreviated rules rundown, as there are many who have come before me. Feel free to skip this paragraph if you know how to play. You and a partner (Pilot and Co-Pilot) begin the game at the start of your planes descent. At the start of the round you can communicate and strategize. Should we rotate, clear plane traffic, slow down, speed up? These are all options available to you, some more pressing than others, depending on the scenario set up. Then you each roll your 4 dice behind a screen. Some slots can take any number, some require specific numbers, and you have to place your dice on the correct color (blue if pilot, orange if co-pilot, with some taking either color). Pilot handles landing gear and breaks and Co-Pilot handles flaps and tower communication to clear the runway. Two dice each are required for plane orientation and engine management. The other dice are up to you. You work together to keep the plane on course, dropping steadily in altitude, until you finally hopefully reach the airport on a clear runway, right side up. There’s also a coffee mechanism where either player can spend a die to brew a cup of coffee, which then allows for + or – 1 die value adjustment, and you get the occasional precious reroll token. There’s about a million ways for it all to go wrong, and that’s where the fun comes in.

There are also I think 20 scenarios in total that add all sorts of fun modules to the game. And let’s face it, that’s going to last me a long while with my gnat-like attention span. There’s a low fuel mechanic where you can’t run out, you can have wind blowing you all over the place, or you might have to land in snowy conditions and need to bust the ice breaks out. Sometimes you’re even training an annoying little intern who can possibly distract you so much that you run headlong into another plane. The variability is great and this game never feels boring. Both the coffee and the reroll tokens provide just enough bad roll mitigation, that you know this game isn’t purely based on randomness. That probably means we’re gonna have to issue an apology at some point for all these crashes.

Here’s something that I think Sky Team does better than so many other board games. Board games operate in the space of ‘decision making’, where you have to close down the solution space of a problem to arrive at a single right answer on each of your turns. For designers, there can be a massive creative opportunity cost associated with designing this (making a topic black and white instead of grey) but Sky Team takes the topic of aviation and distills it into the perfect decisions a pretend pilot should make. There is potentially one correct die placement, so how are you going to arrive at it? You are left with tools to create some grey area, in something as exacting as landing a plane. I think this is brilliant. The onus is on you to get creative. And by creative I mean really practicing your eyebrow control so you can get exactly the right facial expression across to your partner. I will say there is a difference playing this on Board Game Arena with randoms vs playing in person. The person on BGA can’t see my piercing gaze glaring at them as they place EXACTLY the wrong number in EXACTLY the wrong space. Perhaps I should mention here that I’ve never won at Poker.

All in all, Sky Team has produced some of the most tense gaming moments I’ve ever experienced. In one game, after losing multiple times in a row, my husband and I were ready to go to any lengths to land this hunk of metal in Keflavik. Everything was perfect and we had one final die placement. We just had to keep this dang plane level. He placed a 4 and I blinked, looking down at my 1. Then I thought, thank God someone just brewed a vat of coffee! In a desperate moment, but a fantastic one, I pounded 3 cups to turn that 1 into a 4, just in time for a safe landing. Then I shouted to no one in particular, “Someone get this girl a cigarette and a martini!” and my 2 year old replied, “Mommy, why can’t you control your emotions in an entirely make-believe scenario?”, as she pressed a pack of Camels and an olive-laden glass into my hand. I took a drag and said, “You’ll get it when you’re older, kid.”