Sky Team Board Game Review: A Smooth Landing

Sky Team: Smooth Landing is a cooperative board game based on the original airliner theme, where you and your co-pilot try to land. The following paragraphs of our review will tell you how the whole concept works and whether there is anything interesting about it.

• Number of players: 2
• Play time: 20 minutes
• Price: 749 CZK (Alsa)
• Age: 12+

There are two of you in Sky Team: Smooth Landing.

Probably everyone wanted to get on a plane and try themselves in the role of a driver. In the cooperative game Sky Team: Smooth Landing, you take on the role of a couple responsible for controlling an airliner heading to the airport. In front of you is a control panel, which you have to work with in the name of a smooth landing. Both the pilot and the co-pilot control only part of the board, in fact, you could say that only certain areas are represented by their color.

Yes, that’s true. Sky Team: Smooth Landing gives them both a certain color of dice, with which they then perform actions on the board to ensure that the plane lands and does not crash into the ground or otherwise crash. The pilot is primarily responsible for releasing the landing gear, and the co-pilot for the flaps. Both shape these components during flight and thus also determine the behavior of the plane.

Each player has a total of four dice, marked with traditional numbers. Once you have chosen them, you take one of them on your turn and place it on the board according to the needs of your pair. What is necessary for success must be figured out by yourself after the dice are rolled. It is not possible to consult where you should place a given piece. Communication only occurs outside the phases in which you work with the dice, and it is only possible to communicate during it based on the usual goal setting. Therefore, you cannot tell your teammate where to place his potential thrown dice, even if you wanted to, and this work is based on effective dice work.

I won’t be afraid to say that among the actions there are definitely some without which the plane will fall to the ground. Perhaps the engine is like that. When you forget about it and it is not powered by two dice, it is not interesting. No less wild situation then arises when the plane’s tilt is not set so that it flies more or less evenly without the desire to enter a spin, which is not particularly desirable, at least for transport models. Although even these can be switched to within the framework of the dice roll, because players always give value only to their side, and this in practice means that if one number is low and the other is high, there can be a decent wild.

Then you need to actively use the radios in Sky Team: Smooth Landing. This is the only way to get rid of the planes that are “standing” in your way before you head to the given square. In the final, you need a lot of brakes, because you don’t want to go to the vestibule right away, so you place cubes with clear values ​​on three points. However, he will not always wish you luck, and it is for such moments that there are concentration points, with the help of which the player can determine the value of a certain number up or down by the number of tokens that he will use for this action. You can also insert new throw tokens into the dice, with which you can make a throw with all the cubes in your hand or only with the chosen number.

Thanks to the dice and the fact that players cannot communicate with each other while they are placing them, you will have some really hot moments at times. Eventually you usually manage to get the plane to the “house”, but the fun doesn’t stop there. The player is then given a flight log, which is an extension of the rules that allows you to expand the gameplay with fuel, wind, real time, trainee or several scenarios that test your skills. It’s fun to get new scenarios online.

Sky Team: A smooth landing will test your teamwork to the max

The plane has landed safely on the first runway, so it’s time to take a look at the Sky Team rating: Smooth landing. From what I’ve experienced while playing, this is a very successful cooperative board game, the likes of which are simply unmatched on the market. The theme is new and well-designed, so not only is the idea interesting, but the control panel with which you work with the dice is also very fun. Teaming up with another player is fun and tests how well you can play with your thoughts together. So if you like the theme, or are just looking for an accessible game for a few dozen minutes to play with a partner, this is not a bad choice at all.

We would like to thank Czech distributor Blackfire for providing us with a copy of Sky Team: Smooth Landing.