Sky Team

I’ll admit the premise sounded like a gimmick to me before I played it, a plane-landing game where you can’t tell your co-pilot what you rolled. Pilot and co-pilot each roll four dice in secret, place them on a shared board to manage speed, tilt, brakes, flaps, and whatever the airport’s specific hazards are that round, and you can talk strategy before the roll but not after it. Seven rounds, unless you crash first, which you will, more than once, before you land it clean.

What got me is how much tension that one restriction generates out of a genuinely small ruleset. You know your own dice, you can guess at what your partner probably rolled based on what they’re doing, and the moment where you have to commit a die to a spot without being sure it’s the right call is where the whole game lives. It scales difficulty well too, later airports layer on real complications, enough that the early scenarios feel like training wheels in hindsight rather than padding.

The one place it wobbled for us was a couple of the higher-difficulty airports, where a run of two bad rolls in a row is close to unrecoverable and that reads less like tension and more like the dice deciding the session for you. I’d call that the game’s one real luck problem, everything else about the design is tight enough that the randomness mostly gets absorbed by planning around it, but late-game variance spikes are a real thing here and worth knowing before you sit down at the hardest boards.

Setup and teardown take about ninety seconds, which matters more than I expected, because it means we played this three times in one evening without anyone getting tired of the ritual. My partner, who actively dislikes most co-op games because of the alpha-player problem, has asked to play this one unprompted, twice. That tells you more than any number I could put on it.