Sky Team took the world by storm a couple of years ago, winning accolades and awards galore, and I kind of have a complicated relationship with it.

Sky Team, designed by Luc Rémond and published by Scorpion Masqué in 2023 is a two-player cooperative game of limited communication. You and your partner are pilots trying to land a plane. Each of you rolls four dice and keeps them hidden behind your screen. Then, one at a time, you take turns placing the dice in certain areas of your console. Often the the sum of the two dice, one placed by you and one by your partner, will affect different aspects of how the plane flies. The goal of Sky Team is to land safely in the end. That means having no other planes in your way, ensuring your plane isn’t tilted, and touching the ground at a speed that isn’t going to send you hurtling off the end of the runway.

The dice are your only way of communicating with each other. What you place first, and where, is supposed to tell your partner something about what you’re holding. Usually that works. You should more or less trust your partner to do the right thing. But every now and then you get a catastrophically bad roll. Say you need to slow the plane down and then you roll four sixes. There aren’t really any options to make up for a bad roll.

I think the crux of my frustrations with Sky Team is that it’s a game of mitigating randomness, and sometimes you simply can’t. You might roll badly. You might roll yourself into a situation that you and your partner simply cannot overcome, and you might not discover that you’re in an unwinnable situation until that final round. Of course you can always be trying to put yourself in a better position. You can keep a full complement of coffee, and you can hold on to the tokens that let you reroll your dice to hopefully give yourself as many chances as possible to overcome this logistical challenge. But at the end of the day, you really are just at the mercy of the dice.

I don’t particularly enjoy games you can lose just because you didn’t roll right. I’m not against randomness in my games, but in Sky Team you can’t really prepare for what you roll. Maybe you hit a bad streak and roll all ones all game. What are you supposed to do about that? I know statistically it’s not probable, but it’s also not impossible. I prefer having agency. I prefer my victories to be earned, not just delivered as a gift from the dice rolling gods. I prefer my losses to have meaning, lessons I can learn, instead of “darn, that was a tough one, I just didn’t roll the right dice.”

I think back to Gloomhaven and how those scenarios were tense and difficult, and sometimes whiffing your big attack really does just send you and your team careening down a losing battle. The difference is that I chose to take that risk. Sky Team front loads the randomness and then tells you to figure it out.

Despite all this griping, I actually did enjoy playing Sky Team. It did a great job of creating tension, and the moment you successfully land the plane is pretty euphoric. You and your partner overcame the challenge together. You communicated without talking, and you both did your jobs. That feels really good. The randomness does make me lean towards the side of saying that I don’t like Sky Team, but I’d still play I’d play it if asked. I’m not saying it’s a bad game. It’s just a game that I don’t like, and that distinction is important.

But hey, Sky Team won a ton of awards and honours over the past 3 years, its ranked number 32 on the BGG top games of all time (at the time of this writing), so it’s obvious that I’m in the minority here. You could even go as far as saying I’m just plain wrong in my terrible opinions. But that’s the joy of owning a blog. I get to say what I want, even if I’m being unreasonable.