Sky Team

This is the game that finally got Dana to sit down across from me on a regular basis, twice a week some stretches, and if you’d told me a two-player dice game about landing an airplane would do that I’d have laughed. You’re the pilot and co-pilot, you’re rolling dice, allocating them to different systems, and critically, you’re not allowed to talk about your actual dice values, only vague instructions. Let’s make sure we get the plane back to level, one of us will say, without saying what number we’re actually working with, and the other has to interpret and commit.

The tension is real and it’s earned. Landing a plane badly means a hard landing at best, a genuine failure at worst, and there’s a specific kind of panic that sets in around the third or fourth round when the engines are acting up, they’re loud enough you can’t hear your co-pilot clearly, represented mechanically by a communication restriction, and you’re both making educated guesses under real pressure. Setup and teardown together take maybe five minutes. A full session, start to landing, clocks in around twenty.

I don’t have a single real complaint about this one, which almost never happens in these write-ups. It travels, small box, no expansion pressure, no app needed, campaign progression is light and additive rather than punishing if a run goes badly. It’s the one board game currently living on the kitchen table instead of the game room, because we play it on weeknights when there isn’t time for anything bigger. Five stars, no hesitation, my favorite thing I’ve reviewed this year.