Grab a co-pilot, buckle up, and let the dice guide your flight to a (hopefully) smooth landing 🛩️

Quick Info

• Sky Team on BoardGameGeek
• Designers: Luc Rémond
• Publisher: Scorpion Masqué
• Artists: Eric Hibbeler and Adrien Rives
• Release Year: 2023
• Affiliate Purchase Link

Overview

Sky Team is a two-player only cooperative game. Instead of battling it out like most two-player games, the players team up as pilot and co-pilot and work together to land a plane. Each round involves a quick chat about strategy, dice rolling, and more than likely a few dramatic sighs and furtive glances.

Your cockpit is a delightful puzzle of dice slots, each representing critical flight controls. Each round you must roll your dice, then use them to maneuver your plane, manage thrust, prepare for landing, and try not to crash. It’s a dice-fueled dance where each player has specific roles: the co-pilot has two slots to clear the airspace—compared to the pilot’s one—while the pilot exclusively handles the brakes, for example. The tension builds as you hope to turn every roll into forward progress.

Review

If that’s all there was, Sky Team would be a fun, short-lived experience. Instead, Sky Team is one of the finest games of 2023 (even the Spiel des Jares agrees), and one of the finest cooperative games I’ve ever played.

Starting simply, Sky Team gradually ramps up the challenge with a variety of airports ranging in difficulty. Each airport also requires using certain modules, adding layers of strategy and excitement. With six modules, special abilities, and twenty-one airport scenarios, each session feels fresh and demands that classic “one more game” mentality usually reserved for party games and trick-takers.

The game strikes a balance between strategy and luck. The limited ability to manipulate or re-roll dice ensures that even when you lose, you feel a sense of agency. You rarely feel entirely at the whim of bad luck. Maybe if you hadn’t used that re-roll earlier, your roll of three ones and a two wouldn’t be so devastating now. Perhaps you can tread water now and hope that a good roll later will let you catch up.

Sky Team creates memorable stories with every game. Recently, my wife and I tackled a “yellow” difficulty-level airport. We scraped by each round, facing a nail-biting final approach. We needed precise rolls to clear planes and apply brakes. A desperate roll resulted in a crash, sending us into fits of laughter as we pictured our plane’s dramatic end. But in another game, we faced a desperate final state with two re-rolls left. On the final roll, we got the exact number we needed and landed the plane safely.

The components are functional but not luxurious. Expect a lot of cardboard and some assembly with stickers. The dice, however, are clear and easy to read, which helps maintain gameplay flow. At the price point, the production is adequate but doesn’t have a substantial table presence. Despite the modest production quality, the gameplay shines brightly.

In essence, Sky Team is a triumph. While not always perfectly thematic—real pilots can communicate, of course—the enforced silence works in this game. It’s reminiscent of Sail, another fantastic two-player co-op game where planning discussions give way to intense silence where communication happens entirely through the gameplay itself.

Anyone looking for a dynamic two-player experience will find Sky Team is an incredible choice. It’s compact, affordable, and packed with replay value. This one will be on my shelf for a long, long time.