Sky Team by Luc Rémond - a First impressions Review

If you’d like to see what’s actually in the box, check out my unboxing video!

Having listened to myself whilst editing it I can say that, no, the things I thought were tiny hangars are in fact aerodynamic indicator arrows, and whilst I was initially surprised that the dice had numerals instead of pips, I’ve since come to the conclusion that the numerals are much easier to work with on this control panel.

In Sky Team, the 2 players are the pilot and co-pilot. Each round, each player will place 4 dice on different areas of the control panel.

The other two dice can be placed more freely - either on the radio to clear the approach of oncoming air traffic, on deploying the 3 stages of landing gear or 4 stages of flaps (both of which must be completed before landing), on setting up the brakes to stop the plane in the final round, or by preparing coffee concentrating.

This describes the introductory game in Montreal at least. The box contains more landing scenarios which add extra rules and complications to the main setup - but at the time of writing I’ve only had one attempt at landing the plane, and I’m happy to say that it was successful.

Quarterbacking, in terms of a co-op game, has come to mean that moment when someone at the table thinks they know how everyone else should play, and thus the co-operative game is reduced to really a solo experience, with everyone else playing as pawns.

You know that scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, where Ron, Harry and Hermione are playing chess against a mysterious unseen force, but only Ron is calling out the moves and Harry and Hermione merely performing them? That’s quarterbacking. In that story, probably a good plan, Ron was the only one actually any good at chess, but the experience can’t have been fun for the others.

Thankfully, landing a plane isn’t chess, and no-one’s life is on the line in this game. (Obviously, if you’re actually landing an actual plane as a co-pilot, please keep the passengers alive by listening to what the pilot has to say.)

This game neatly avoids quarterbacking with hidden information and reduced communication in phases. This can be a dangerous strategy - isolating the players from each other to prevent quarterbacking can backfire if it goes far enough to prevent teamwork.

The genius here is that the isolation is limited to part of a turn, and with the game split into 7 rounds with time for a strategy discussion at the beginning of the round you get than planning moment to gel and truly feel like a team. As soon as you have rolled your dice for the round you’re headed straight to Drama Central, remaining silent until each player has placed their 4 dice, at which point you can breathe a sigh of relief and debrief, planning out the next round.

The tension ramps as you agonise over what order to place your dice in, but is quickly released just 4 decisions later before it can really get overwhelming. The ebb and flow of having a team pep-talk between each short period of silence provides a great emotional pacing to the game.

My one play of this game was with my 14 year old son. He commented during the game that it is tense, and he’s not wrong! He enjoyed getting to work as a team though and figure out how he could use his dice placement to communicate with me, and he said something profound about the dice rolling - he said that the dice felt like resources that he had to figure out what to do with, and not like dice that decided whether we won or lost. There’s a full 7 round walkthrough of our game at the bottom of this post, where you can see that we certainly made use of the luck-mitigation features of the coffee cups and the limited re-roll tokens.

Either player can brew coffee by using a die on any number, and coffee tokens can be used later in the game to adjust the rolled number up or down by 1 for each coffee cup used (no, you can’t spin a 1 into a 6 or vice versa). In the Montreal flight, you get one re-roll token right at the beginning of the game at 6000 feet, and one more when you have descended to 2000 feet (i.e. at the start of round 5 of 7)

We also decided that whilst it’s nice that the pilot and co-pilot have some differences in their play, neither of us felt that the roles were so different that we needed to re-run the same mission with us sat in opposite seats. The difference between the two roles include:

I picked up Sky Team for a number of reasons:

Having initially been quite suspicious that I would get anything much out of co-operatively landing a plane in silence, I’m very glad I did eventually go for this game. My son is looking forwards to playing more of the scenarios in the box, and I’m pretty sure I can get my wife to give the game a go, even though there’s not a single anthropomorphic animal in sight. After one play I can see the potential this game has, can confirm it’s fun straight from your first approach, and whilst my first play ended in a successful landing it wasn’t trivial, I’m glad I had my full concentration on the game, and I’m looking forwards to what the game may throw at me for future attempts to land in tougher conditions around the world.

If you don’t enjoy co-operative games, or don’t really have the right people to play 2-player games with, this game isn’t going to be for you - there’s no way to play this competitively or with more than 2 players, and whilst there is no official way to play solo there is a variant published on BGG. And you know what Nat would say about House rules - go ahead and mod your game for solo if that’s what makes you tick!

(If you don’t know what Nat would say about House rules… go and re-read last week’s Design Corner! Curious Lynx Games Weekly Newsletter - 1st March Edition)

In researching this article I had a quick play of Sylvain’s variant linked here and it does a great job of converting the game to a solo experience with a light touch - minimal changes to keep some of how the game feels for 2-players. I think I will happily go for a solo run through all the flight paths in the box, but after I’ve tackled them 2-player as I don’t want to spoil the experience.

As a quick playing 2-player game with an equally quick teach, this is a great game for bonding with the gamer in your life over a little bit of shared drama and tension.

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Hopefully I’ve given you enough of an idea of how the game plays above to tempt you in to having a go yourself, but if you’d like a deep dive into what a full game could look like, read on!

Before placing my second dice, I used a re-roll and only slightly improved my roll to 4, 6, 6. 4 went on the Axis and I crossed my fingers, an as luck would have it my co-pilot could fix our plane’s tilt immediately, letting me used the coffee we had built up to spin one of my remaining 6s down to 4 to deploy the middle landing gear.

I upped the brakes for 6 for no good reason, just to show off, and my co-pilot celebrated a successful landing by making more coffee. Our first landing was a resounding success! However, I can easily see that with additional traffic on the approach we might not have had time to fix our remaining problems. I’m looking forwards to game 2!