Base price: $30.
2 players.
Play time: ~15 minutes.
BGG Link
Buy on Amazon (via What’s Eric Playing?)
Logged plays: 13
Full disclosure: A review copy of Sky Team was provided by Hachette Boardgames / Le Scorpion Masqué.
Well, it’s a travel week for me (or at least I’m traveling when I’m writing this), but it makes a certain amount of sense to also shoot for two-player games on this, the classic Valentine’s Day Week. Whether you’re in a relationship or not, there are always games that benefit from two people playing them in the most platitude-heavy sense possible. I mostly tend towards two-player games out of both convenience and a preference for more zero-sum interactions, since there’s less of an ability for players to dogpile each other if there are only two of them. But that’s hardly relevant here, since this is cooperative anyways. Let’s check out a recent favorite, Sky Team, from the ever-talented folks at Scorpion Masqué!
In Sky Team, your goal is to land the plane. That’s a nice, simple, and straightforward summary. However, actually landing a plane is a lot harder than it sounds. Over the course of several unique games and scenarios, you’ll have to deal with everything from the altimeter to the flaps to the landing gear to an intern to making coffee to ice brakes to kerosene to, you know, not crashing into other planes. All in a day’s work for you and your copilot. But surely you can land safely?
Contents
Setup
I’m only going to cover the most basic setup, here; there are a ton of different scenarios that add more complex pieces and mechanics over time. Easiest way to start is to place the board in the center, to start. There are a ton of little switches and pieces that will go into it, so place those in as well:
Give each player a player screen:
There are also dice in the corresponding color. Technically you choose which player is pilot and which is copilot first and then assign them the dice and the player screen, but do what you want; just make sure you’re sitting in the right spots.
Slide the Approach and Altitude Tracks into the left and right slots on the top of the board (respectively). They both should have the bottom-most space (the cloud and 6000) visible. Place Reroll Tokens on the indicated spaces on the Altitude Track. Note that these are the tracks for the starter version; more come in the box!
The Approach Track has little plane symbols on certain spaces; place the corresponding number of plane tokens onto those spaces.
Place the Coffee Tokens nearby.
You should be about ready to start!
Gameplay
A game of Sky Team takes place over several rounds, as players work together to successfully land the plane. To do so, you need to have a few things in order:
- You have to deploy your flaps.
- You have to deploy your landing gear.
- You have to make it to the airport.
- You have to slow the plane to a stop.
Keeping that in mind (and the fact that those requirements will expand in more challenging scenarios), let’s talk about how to land a plane!
To start a round, players may first discuss strategy, but once any dice are rolled the discussion is over. Both players roll the dice, and then turns alternate between the pilot and the co-pilot, with each player going “first” in alternating rounds. Each turn, a player must place one of their dice on an available spot of their color. If it has a number on the space, the die must match that number. If it has a range, the die must be within that range. Otherwise, any number will work, but it may change the effect.
Some effects only trigger once both players have placed a die, for instance on the Axis (the plane turns X spaces towards the bigger number, where X is the bigger number minus the smaller number) or the Engine (the plane advances 0, 1, or 2 spaces on the Approach Track, depending on where the sum of the two dice falls). Some effects trigger when one die is placed, such as the Flaps or Landing Gear which deploy and then advance the corresponding tracker by one or the Coffee, which instantly adds a Coffee Token to the board, or the Radio tower, which removes a plane token from the space X away on the Approach Track (where X is the value on the die). You can spend up to three Coffee Tokens (if you have them) to increase or decrease your die’s value by 1 (to a max of 6 or minimum of 1, and a 1 can’t become a 6 or vice-versa).
In the Final Round, players switch their Engine to braking rather than the standard Engine Track. To land safely, the sum of your Engine Dice must be below the Brake Value (either 2, 4, or 6, depending on how many dice you placed previously). If you manage to stop the plane successfully, you win!
You can lose in a variety of ways:
- You collide with another plane on the Approach Track.
- You end a round without two dice on the Axis and two dice on the Engines.
- You fail to deploy the Flaps and the Landing Gear.
- You run out of spaces on the Altitude Track but you’re not at the Airport.
- You move past the Airport Space when you’re not at 0 on the Altitude Track.
You know, things like that. Good luck!
Player Count Differences
Nothing to say about this one; it’s two-player games week!
Strategy
- Don’t immediately go after your Flaps and Landing Gear. If you do, you run the risk of making it more difficult for your team to move one or two spaces (or remove the ability to move two spaces at all). If you can’t move two spaces anymore and you end up behind on the Approach Track, that’s a Nonstandard Game Over. There’s no way for you to get to the Airport in time.
- You don’t always want to advance on the Approach Track, either. Similarly, if you hustle too quickly on the Approach Track you risk hitting a plane, which also ends your game pretty quickly. Turns out, passengers don’t love mid-air collisions and you’re going to get very bad reviews.
- Different players have different skills; try to lean into your strengths. You might want to spend more dice on the brakes if you’re the Pilot and more dice on the Radio if you’re the Co-Pilot, for instance.
- Communicate when you can! Don’t just immediately roll the dice each round; plan ahead a bit and see what options you have available to you.
- Rerolling dice isn’t bad; also try to think about what your partner may need. Sometimes you might want to use it as soon as the round starts to give your partner more options, too.
- There may be ways to signal your intentions, but as is usually the case in limited communication games, you run the risk of getting misinterpreted. I can’t necessarily guarantee any particular heuristic to use, honestly; anything you do can be interpreted a number of ways depending on the players. You may find some patterns emerge as you play with the same players over multiple games, though?
- Sometimes it helps to wait. You can actually wait a bit if you’re trying to move planes; if you place on the Engines, you’ll advance on the Approach Track, which means that you’ll have those planes all closer to you. Just keep in mind that you might want to wait for your coplayer to move some planes first if they’re going to; you don’t want to suddenly make a play of theirs impossible!
Pros, Mehs, and Cons
Pros
- The theme is very fun. I think people don’t like flying because airlines have made air travel awful, but people generally like planes, I think. Plus they’re just … fun.
- I really like how the game expands with complexity and more things to do over the course of the ridiculous number of scenarios. There are a lot (20+) scenarios in the core game. You’ll have plenty to do. There are also a number of promo scenarios, so I imagine there will be more of those.
- It’s also pretty expandable, which I like. The promo scenarios make it clear all you need is a little bit of cardboard or a new card with some symbols and you’ve got a new scenario (sometimes two!). I hope there’s an expansion coming sometime soon, though it wouldn’t surprise me either way.
- I really like this thing places have been doing lately with “DIY double-layered boards” where they just make single-layer boards that you fold over and then glue. Starship Captains did it too! I think it’s great and I assume it cuts down on manufacturing costs since it’s not quite as specific. Plus, it’s a little fun to assemble, though I resent at some mild level the offloading of that kind of work to me, the end-consumer.
- Plays pretty quickly! You can hustle through it once you start getting the gist of the various scenarios, and everything is modular anyways.
- I appreciate how, as you’re learning, every game feels like you just barely won. There’s some smart design to it. It’s generally pretty close games, for me, until I get experienced with it all. I can win the intro scenario pretty handily, usually, but the tougher ones are still giving me a fair amount of trouble, which I appreciate.
Mehs
- Both games this week could stand to be a little larger. I just … there are a lot of tiny pieces, and I can’t always make heads or tails of what’s going on. I kind of wish the whole thing were maybe 30% larger?
- It’s … just okay asynchronously and remotely. I appreciate that it’s on Board Game Arena, but it takes so much longer (since there’s so much back-and-forth) and you miss out on a lot of the pre-round communication and such. I’d rather play a synchronous game over a video call because that same-time, same-place play is where the game really shines.
Cons
- Honestly, placing the little switches every time is the bane of my existence but I’m too nervous to just leave them in the board between games. Here specifically, there are a lot of them, they kind of just sit in the board without being tight enough that I’m confident they won’t fall out. Currently my fix is just to have someone else place them.
Overall: 9 / 10
Overall, I think Sky Team is fantastic! I like a good cooperative game, as y’all know, but there’s also a lot of nice things happening within the game, both from an “interesting dice placement” standpoint and a “cleverly managing limited resources” standpoint. It does one of my favorite things that board games can do, which is scale in complexity as players progress through the various scenarios. There’s a nice ramp as you start adding in things like the Kerosene (place a die every round to decrease the track or it decreases by 6) or training the intern, and I particularly like the randomization effects that add planes to the Approach Track at the start of the game, just to switch it up. If you really want to dig into Sky Team and get better, there are a lot of challenges that are pretty darn difficult. Between this and Daybreak, last year was an incredible year for cooperative games and I’m excited to see what’s next. I like the theme, the style of the game, and I generally just think it’s well-designed (as I’ve come to expect from Scorpion Masqué). Plus, there’s a bit of variance between the Pilot and Co-Pilot, so I’ve been able to enjoy the same scenario multiple times on different sides of the table. If you’re looking for a great two-player co-op, you love games that grow to your preferred difficulty, or you just want to land a plane, I’d highly recommend Sky Team! I think it’s fantastic.
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