Sky Team Review

You know what's all the rage these days? Cooperative games. Two-player games. Dice games. Campaign games. Put all those together and you get Sky Team. Is it any wonder, then, that Sky Team is so incredibly popular? It's been one of the most highly rated and best selling games since it released in 2023, and it shows no signs of slowing down yet.

On paper, it's right up my alley—so I knew I had to check it out. I've been trying to trade for it or buy it at auction or snag it on sale for a long time, but its sky-high popularity has made it tough to acquire. I ended up caving and buying a fresh new copy, hoping that it'd live up to the hype and that my partner and I would be enamored by it.

Here's how my experience with Sky Team has been, what's it like to play, where it stands strong and falls short, and everything else you need to know to decide whether or not Sky Team is a game worth getting.

This review is based on my own personal copy of Sky Team, which I bought new from Gamers Guild AZ. Not a free review copy.

Overview

Sky Team is a game where two pilots—you and your partner—are working together to land a plane. As your plane approaches the airport and descends, you must assign rolled dice to various parts of your cockpit dashboard to get your plane prepped and aligned for a safe landing.

You and your partner each have your own set of four dice, and each die is numbered from 1 to 6. You roll all of your dice at the start of each round, then take turns placing one die at a time on the Control Panel to satisfy various actions needed to prep the plane for landing. After placing all four dice, you recall your dice and roll again for the next round. Your goal is to have everything ready by the seventh round, else you crash.

The thing is, Sky Team is played in silence. You can't openly communicate with your partner—whether verbally, with body language, or otherwise—about your dice values. To make matters worse, certain parts of the Control Panel can only be fulfilled by a particular pilot. That means you have to somehow work together to make sure all tasks are fulfilled.

There are seven different areas of the Control Panel where you can place dice, and each one contributes in its own way toward a safe landing:

The Axis determines how straight or tilted the plane is. Both players must place at least one die each on the Axis every round. Once both dice are placed, the plane tilts based on the difference of the two dice, leaning in the direction of the larger die. If the plane tilts too much, it crashes. If it isn't completely horizontal in the final round, it crashes.

The Engine determines the plane's speed. Both players must place at least one die each on the Engine every round. Once both dice are placed, the plane advances on the Approach track toward the airport by either 0, 1, or 2 spaces depending on the sum of the two dice and where that sum falls along the spectrum: before the blue marker (0 spaces), between the blue and orange markers (1 space), or after the orange marker (2 spaces). If there are Airplanes on the Approach track when the plane moves forward, it crashes.

The Radio lets you clear Airplanes from the Approach track. The value of the die you place in a Radio spot determines how far along the Approach track you count, and you can remove an Airplane from that space. In the above image, the 3 die played to the Radio lets me remove the plane from the third space along the Approach track.

There are three Landing Gear actions, and each one must be completed by the seventh round. The first is activated with a 1 or 2 die, the second with a 3 or 4 die, and the third with a 5 or 6 die. Only the blue pilot can activate the Landing Gear. (When a Landing Gear is deployed, the blue marker on the Engine is moved up, thus slowing down the plane.)

There are four Wing Flap actions, and each one must be completed by the seventh round. The first is activated with a 1 or 2 die, the second with a 2 or 3 die, the third with a 4 or 5 die, and the fourth with a 5 or 6 die. Only the orange pilot can activate the Wing Flaps, and unlike the Landing Gear, the Wing Flaps must be activated in order. (When a Wing Flap is activated, the orange marker on the Engine is moved up, thus slowing down the plane.)

The Concentration area lets you brew Coffee tokens. Coffee tokens can later be spent to adjust a die value by +1 or -1, giving you more flexibility to complete tasks. This is a good way to use dice that aren't useful anywhere else, effectively letting you sacrifice a bad die to help you out later. Both pilots can place dice in the Concentration area.

The Brakes only come into play on the seventh round, but can be engaged during any round. The first is activated with a 2 die, the second with a 4 die, and the third with a 6 die. Only the blue pilot can activate the Brakes, and the Brakes must be activated in order.

Over seven rounds, you go back and forth placing rolled dice to complete the various Control Panel tasks, and you win if all the following conditions are met by the end of the seventh round:

• The Approach track is at the airport with no Airplanes.
• The Axis is completely horizontal.
• All the Landing Gear and Wing Flaps are activated.
• The Engine speed is less than or equal to the activated Brakes value.

If the above is true, congrats! You've safely landed the plane.

This is all just the core Montreal airport gameplay. Sky Team has dozens of other missions in the box, each with their own twists and extra modules that increase the difficulty and complexity of landing.

Setup and Table Footprint

Because Sky Team has a handful of little tokens and pieces to initialize on the board (e.g., various switch flips, Engine and Brake markers, planes on the Approach track, coffee cups, etc.), the setup process isn't exactly fast.

The basic Montreal mission, which only contains the core gameplay with zero bells or whistles, takes about 3 to 4 minutes to set up. On top of initializing those tokens, you need to pull out the Control Panel, the player dice and shields, and the Approach and Altitude tracks.

For all the other missions, you have to refer to the Flight Log booklet to see which modular boards also need to be taken out and set up. That might add an additional 2 or 3 minutes. Overall, it isn't fast, it isn't slow. The annoying part is digging through the box and finding all the needed components.

Sky Team excels with its minimal table footprint, though, especially when playing the base Montreal mission. The Control Panel is compact and centralized, and the player shields are cleverly designed to pull triple duty as privacy screens, dice rolling trays, and player aids.

Everything is organized without any clutter. And even with the extra modular boards on harder missions, none of them make the Control Panel that much bigger. They're all quite small with minimal fiddliness. A lot of attention went into its design and it's easy to appreciate on the table.

Learning Curve

Sky Team is a simple game with a moderate learning curve, and that's just the base Montreal gameplay I'm talking about. While all the extra modules do add further complexity, the game does a fantastic job easing you into all of them as long as you progress through the missions in order. It's one new gameplay mechanism at a time, all cleanly building on each other.

But back to the base Montreal gameplay. Sky Team is essentially seven tiny minigames that each have their own rules and influences. The actual action is exceedingly simple (all you do is put a die on an open spot), but you have to understand why you'd place a die in one spot over another—and to do that, you have to understand how each minigame works and what it contributes to the overall progress toward meeting victory conditions.

There are many ways to lose in Sky Team, and there are several conditions you need to meet by the final round to win. The switch-up in the final round (from Engine to Brakes) is also one extra thing to grasp and remember. It's a non-trivial amount of upfront learning that can be confusing for non-gamers, but shouldn't be an issue for anyone who has exposure to the hobby.

Game Experience

Decision Space

On the surface, Sky Team may seem pretty boring. You roll some dice, you place them on the board, you recall those dice, then repeat across seven rounds and hope you're able to complete everything in time. But the interplay between the different minigames and your own dice versus your partner's dice lead to some interestingly tense decisions.

For starters, you and your partner always have to play dice to the Axis and Engine areas, which consumes two of your four dice. That means you only have two dice per round to handle all the other stuff, which puts a lot of pressure on you to delegate dice properly. It's all about risk management, about knowing which dice values are "safe" and "unsafe" for the different minigames based on current round conditions, about making as much progress as you can while maintaining a healthy Axis and ensuring a steady approach to the airport with the right Engine plays.

But how do you know which dice are safe or unsafe to play? Well, that's the beauty of Sky Team: there's no clear answer as to what the "right" dice plays are. It all depends on the relative value of your dice versus your partner's dice. For example, if your partner plays a 4 to the Axis, then the "right" play for you might be to play a 4 if you need to hold the balance steady, or you might need to play a 6 if you need to roll one way, or you might need to play a 3 to do a slight roll the other way.

Sky Team is all about this action and reaction between you and your partner. It feels a lot like ballroom dancing: one person leads and the other follows. This back-and-forth is key to success, as everything you do gives information to your partner while asking them to give you information in return. The player who leads changes every round, and that's really what makes Sky Team feel like a dance of silent cooperation.

So, it's not just about playing the "right" dice. When you're leading, it's about playing your dice in the right order—not just the numerical order, but the order in which you place them on the various Control Panel areas. When you're following, it's about using the order of your partner's dice placements to decipher what they're trying to tell you about the dice hidden behind their shield and responding as best as you can with your own dice.

At its core, Sky Team is pretty straightforward. You want to maintain Axis and Engine while completing the other objectives. What makes it difficult is that you don't always have the dice values you need, so it's ultimately a game about constantly making imperfect moves while working together so that those imperfections even out. If you can manage that, you'll land the plane with a sigh of relief and a satisfying rush.

Luck Factor

Sky Team has dice rolls, so of course it's going to have some luck. The question is, how much can you do about it? And how much does luck affect the likelihood of winning? Turns out, it's not so bad.

Yes, when you roll your four dice, you're stuck with those results. But you have enough dice placement options that you can usually find a satisfactory (if not ideal) spot for them. And with the game being played over seven rounds, you can focus on different areas per round while hoping for better rolls in upcoming rounds. You have time to get the dice you need.

That said, things can get sticky in the later rounds, especially when you're dealing with the Wing Flaps and Brakes (which have to be progressed in order). If you wait too many rounds before tackling these, you might find yourself in trouble. And that's why the Coffee tokens exist, which can be spent to manually adjust dice values up and down. Coffee tokens are invaluable in later rounds, allowing you to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat as long as you proactively brew those Coffee tokens ahead of time.

Between all of the above, there are enough ways to work around bad dice rolls and pull out victories. There are also one-time-use Reroll tokens that let both you and your partner completely reroll dice, which is great as a last resort when you're truly boned.

Fun Factor

Sky Team has the feel of a deduction game, with the silent back-and-forth between you and your partner as you try to figure out each other's dice values and what you can each accomplish in the round. It's thinky, it's all in your own head due to the limited communication, and it's about learning to read your partner's actions if you want to succeed.

There's no table talk here, save for the brief planning phase at the start of each round before you roll your dice. The tension is solely rooted in the fear that you won't be able to accomplish everything you need to do in time, with pressure growing from round to round as you approach the airport, all while hoping that your partner will handle their stuff as well.

When you succeed, it's both rewarding and satisfying—but only if the mission was adequately challenging. If the base Montreal mission and the other easy missions don't give you that nail-biting tension, try some of the medium or hard missions. They're bound to get you sweating.

Pacing

Sky Team is a wonderfully paced experience. Seven fixed rounds of action, four simple dice placements per round. One player leads while the other follows, with an ebbing and flowing of decisions that ramp up over those seven rounds, with every dice placement more important than the last.

The game arc is clear: you have a bunch of tasks to manage, and whatever tasks you can't complete in a round become imminently more pressing with every round that passes, such that the pressure mounts and pushes you into a corner that only you can claw out of. It's a gradual but inevitable ramp, and it crescendos to a catastrophic failure or a cathartic victory.

Turn-wise, Sky Team is snappy and downtime is minimal. You assess, you think, you place a die. Back and forth four times. Recall your dice and repeat. It reliably plays in just under 30 minutes, assuming no one gets caught up in analysis paralysis (which doesn't really happen). It's also pass-fail without a score to tally up, which makes the climax that much cleaner.

Player Interaction

The interaction in Sky Team is more subtle and indirect than you might expect in a two-player cooperative game. You don't ask direct questions or give direct hints. And you're dealing with your own areas of the Control Panel, so it's not like you can directly help each other out. You have no way to offer immediate support or help your partner accomplish their tasks.

But there is interaction. Every die you place gives information to your partner, whether it's to say that your dice are forcing you to handle some task first, or that you can't deal with another task at all, or that you want to see what your partner puts down before you commit your die to a shared task. It's nebulous, and it's all on you to figure out what your partner is saying without words.

Without this hidden melding of minds, you might be able to beat the base Montreal mission and some of the other easy missions, but you won't be able to tackle the harder ones (at least without relying solely on luck).

Replayability

The way I see it, there are two types of replayability in Sky Team.

First, you have the campaign that takes you through different missions comprised of different settings and modules that gradually get harder with all the extra expectations they put on you. If your goal is to beat all of those missions, you'll be playing Sky Team at least 21 times (once per mission, plus however many times you need to retry due to failures).

This is great because every mission feels like its own spin on Sky Team's core gameplay, with fresh combinations of mechanisms to keep you on your toes. It's replayable in the same way that a puzzle video game is replayable: you want to solve each level's twist and progress through those challenges.

Second, you have Sky Team as a game itself and each mission is just a particular setup for that game. You can just grab whatever mission you want based on the difficulty and modules you like, then replay it as many times as you find enjoyable. The core gameplay is engaging enough to make this worthwhile, all while adjusting it to your tastes.

Sky Team isn't a game I want to play every night or even every week, but it is one I enjoy and one I want to come back to regularly. It has the special sauce that deftly strikes a balance between challenge, cooperation, strategy, deduction, and tension without frustration. It doesn't grow stale quickly, and when it does, you can switch up the missions to keep it fresh.

Production Quality

Scorpion Masqué is a phenomenal publisher who knows how to put out a striking production. They've had ample practice with past hits like Decrypto and Turing Machine, and Sky Team is a serious refinement.

Excellent dual-layered boards and tracks. Sky Team is unusual in that it has you punch out and assemble the dual-layered boards yourself (using some included adhesive tags), but it's not a huge deal. If it keeps the cost down, then I'm all for it. All I know is that these dual-layered boards and tracks elevate the whole thing—they always do—and make it a far more enjoyable experience as you place dice, adjust meters, etc.

Satisfying dice with personality. On the one hand, Sky Team's dice are minimal. They're just solid blue and orange dice with printed numbers, and the numbers are 1 through 6 so they aren't even unique. But the bold colors and the number font gives them a surprising amount of personality, and that also carries over to the other black die (used in certain missions). You see these dice and you can immediately tell they're from Sky Team.

Thoughtfully designed player shields. I love how these player shields serve triple duty: as privacy screens to keep dice rolls hidden, as enclosed spaces for rolling dice every round, and as player aids with helpful reminders of how the game plays and the victory conditions. I also love how they assemble and disassemble in half a second. They're great.

Vibrant colors, pleasing art style, and remarkable graphic design. Sky Team leans heavily into its blue-and-orange theme in a branded way, but it augments all of that with lovely artwork, intuitive iconography, and brilliantly designed boards and tracks that minimize friction. So much thought and care went into its creation. It's rather impressive.

Compact box full of modular content. I love when a game doesn't oversell its gameplay with a larger-than-necessary box. In fact, Sky Team does the opposite. In this modestly sized box, you get a significant amount of content with all the different combinations of boards and tracks. It's a smart way to boost value, and it makes it that much easier to recommend this game.

The Bottom Line

Sky Team is a winner. If you're looking for a two-player cooperative game that mixes deduction, mind melding, and risk management with a heaping dose of ratcheting tension, this is for you. There's a lot of streamlined gameplay packed into this box, complete with modular replayability and delightful satisfaction when you pull off a win.

Buy it from:
Amazon • Miniature Market • Noble Knight Games

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