Disclosure: Meeple Mountain received a free copy of this product in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. This review is not intended to be an endorsement.
Sky Team is a terrific cooperative two-player game, in which two pilots work together to land a plane. Mechanically straightforward and easy in its unvarnished form, Sky Team finds delight and challenge in variety: the box includes around 20 scenarios that slowly ratchet up the tension. If the first handful of flights represent a calm if demanding day at the office, the later scenarios are a frenzy of precision and prayer.
The brilliance of Sky Team’s design and development is its simplicity. You can learn the fundamentals in just a couple of minutes. All of those scenarios find their individuality through airports—strips of paper that effortlessly adjust how crowded the sky is, the flight path you have to follow, and how far you have to travel—and combinations of a handful of equally approachable modules. The tension is ratcheted up without putting any increased rules burden on the players. It’s no wonder the game has been a commercial juggernaut.
Given that Sky Team is a scenario-based design, expansions were inevitable. If Turbulence is any indication, they should also be welcome.
Buckle Up
The primary innovation in Sky Team: Turbulence is the titular meteorological phenomena, a new mechanic that makes it impossible to plan out your turns. While a normal round of Sky Team starts with both players rolling all of their dice before taking turns placing said dice out on the board one at a time, rounds with turbulence require both players to reroll at the end of each turn. Every play is a matter of urgency, “What fire do I need to put out first?” You almost always need to put out several fires at once, so good luck with that.
Turbulence also introduces a series of new airports, many of which take advantage of its single new module. This module, which involves cascading system failures, is such a natural fit for Sky Team that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was part of the original design. These new scenarios not only maintain the high standards of the original release, they crank the tension up to absurd degrees.
What pleases me most about Turbulence, though, is that it doesn’t play things safe. Several of the scenarios include drastic—but still simple—rule changes. Sky Team’s many scenarios feel by and large about the same, outside of the varying degrees of clenching involved. Turbulence introduces scenarios that have a completely different feel. They are a welcome addition to the canon.
On top of all that, Turbulence is cheap and fits easily into the base box. Designer Luc Rémond has done it again. Sky Team: Turbulence is about as good an expansion as Sky Team fans could hope for.
Sky Team: Turbulence details
- Designer: Luc Rémond
- Artists: Adrien Rives
- Publishers: 999 Games, KOSMOS, Lucky Duck Games, Reflexshop, Scorpion Masqué, Tabletop KZ
- Release Date: 2024
- Player count : 2
- Age range : 12+
- Time range : 15 minutes
- Mechanism(s): Communication Limits, Cooperative Game, Dice Rolling, Scenario / Mission / Campaign Game, Worker Placement with Dice Workers
- BGG Geek Rating: 8.5057 - converted to Meeple Mountain scale: 4.5.
- More articles about Sky Team: Turbulence.
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