Sky Team immerses you in the anguish of a pilot from a game board

What is a board game? Sky Team ?

Adjust the axis, manage the speed of the jet engines, deploy the flaps, extend the landing gear… you and your co-pilot have a lot to do to successfully land your plane without incident.

Accessible from 12 years old, for two players only, in cooperation, and with games lasting around twenty minutes, here is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated games of the end of the year.

Published by Le Scorpion Masqué, Sky Team is a game by Luc Rémond, illustrated by Eric Hibbeler and Adrien Rives, and sold at the price of €26.90 at Philibert.

How do you play it?

Set up

The installation is very quick.

We install the dashboard in the center of the table. The latter includes a certain number of commands, with locations for placing dice.

Each player takes the four dice of their color, and a small screen.

Finally, we choose an airport to land in among the ten offered in the box, as well as one of the four difficulty levels.

Depending on the airport and the difficulty chosen, some additional rules and material elements may be added.

Then the game can start.

Progress of a game

The goal of the game is to land your plane. You start at 6,000 feet above sea level, and no matter what you do, your craft descends 1,000 feet at the end of each turn. Everything else is up to you, the pilot and co-pilot.

Everyone has four dice of their color which they throw behind a small screen, so that the faces remain hidden from the teammate.

In turn, you then place one of your dice on a location provided for this purpose: the blue boxes are reserved for the pilot, the orange boxes for the co-pilot. Some of them are numbered, and therefore require you to place a corresponding die face there. An action, which depends on the chosen location, is then resolved.

It can thus be the axis, which determines the inclination of your plane. From the radio, to ask the control tower to clear other aircraft in your path. Reactors, which determine the speed of the machine, so it can move more or less quickly.

You can also deploy the flaps, or the landing gear. Apply the brakes to slow down sufficiently on the track. If you don’t have anything special to do, you can prepare a coffee, which allows you, later in the game, to increase or decrease the value of a die by one point.

What purpose ? Reach the airport when your plane hits the ground. But be careful, there are numerous risks of accidents. If you are too off-axis, the plane goes into a spin, if you hit the ground before reaching the airport, it’s a crash, if you land too fast, you go off the runway, if you hit a plane… you get the idea.

Additional difficulty: players are prohibited from speaking once the dice are rolled. Before that, they can agree on an action plan for the current round. But once they roll the dice, it’s radio silence.

The turns follow one another like this, until the landing or the crash.

The game also offers several airports, with additional rules, as well as several difficulty levels. We’ll leave you surprised to find out what it is.

Why play Sky Team?

Sky Team was a rather anticipated game, the lucky few who were able to try it before its release (at the Cannes Film Festival for example) were full of praise for it.

And it is clear… that the first impressions were completely justified. Let’s not create unnecessary suspense, it is, in our opinion, one of the few strong games of 2023, alongside the many other excellent two-player games released this year (Mingbug, Focus Or Tomorrow you killed me).

If you like playing in pairs as well as cooperative games, you can stop reading now and go buy the game. If doubt persists, you can try it with a friend on Board Game Arena (if one of the two is a subscriber).

It’s simple, Sky Teamis a success on all levels. The rules are simple to understand, and few in number. The games are fast, but tense. Renewal is assured, thanks to the different airports, modules, and difficulty levels.

The theme is original, and the mechanics fit perfectly. And you don’t have to be an aviation fan to enjoy playing it. The game is also very complete, and we always have lots of things to do and anticipate, even though we only have four dice, and therefore four actions each turn. Be careful though, this is not a simulation, we are not in a board game Flight Simulator .

The ban on speaking adds a real plus to the games. We are obliged to make ourselves understood differently, to try to guess what the other could play, to encourage them to do this or that action. Simply by placing, or not placing, such a die, such a value, on such a location. Depending on your playing partner and their way of thinking, the games and the sensations are different.

Looking for the little beast under torture, we might find that this ban on communication is not very thematic (at least, we keep our fingers crossed that pilot and co-pilot talk when they are at the controls of a plane). Playfully, on the other hand, it works like a charm, as was already the case for Accomplices.

Sky Teamis one of the very best games of this year, a must-have for lovers of two-player and cooperative games. It’s simple, clever as anything, with fast but tense parts. The theme is original, and the mechanics consistent. And, the icing on the cake, it comes in a small, well-filled box.

In short

We liked

• Simple, but complete
• Original theme and consistent mechanics
• Fast and tense games
• Guaranteed renewal
• A small box

We liked it less

• Uh…
• The thematic inconsistency in the ban on communicating, strictly speaking

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