Sky Team - TCbH Mini Review

all right fam we need to talk about Sky Team the 2024 Spiel winner where two players cooperatively are trying to land a plane at one of several airports each with their unique challenges and distances and tribulations that you're going to have to face this game is one of the best two-player games that I have played in ages and that's accounting for how many Buck Wild two-player games have come out in the last several years it is just such a rich Nuance game that oozes theme in everything that you do the components have such a great way of imbu thematic resonance into the actions that you're taking even though ultimately it's kind of an abstract dice worker placement game where you and your partner are just alternating placing dice without absolute assurity of what the other player is doing from the acrylic radial dial used to indicate the tilt of the ship as you're both trying to pull the steering in One Direction or another based off of the strength of the dice that you're both having to place mandatorily every turn to the different switches and yeah those donkey little switches are a bit fiddly but they do imbue a lot of fun and playfulness in the Tableau that you're interacting with but for all that I'm a gameplay guy and it completely delivers at worst it's a short challenging game where you are just worker placing dice back and forth trying to complete the mandatory objectives and time everything right so that you land at the airport at the same time that you are pulling in that distance based off of a number of rounds but at its best you develop a sort of sympatico with your partner where you're able to communicate so much information without being able to say anything based on off of the dice that you're placing and there are a lot of levers that you can pull both within the game that you can strategically anticipate challenges that you can do preventative work but also levers that you can pull in the variability of the game different difficulties different challenges different angles that you have to sweep the plane in to land perfectly to different distances to the airport so you have to be careful about how fast or slow that you're managing as you're dropping out of the freaking sky for how fastpac of a game this is taking only about 20 minutes for any given scenario it feels methodical contemplative but altogether thrilling Sky team is one of my favorite games