If every airplane flight is as prone to failure as Luc Rémond’s Sky Team makes out, a third of passengers will never make it to their destination. That makes modern transportation the equivalent of buckling yourself into a faster Hindenburg.

Awesome.

Tilting the plane.

Sky Team is a cooperative game. For two players. Driven largely by dice. As a cooperative two-player game driven largely by dice, it has a conundrum to tackle. Namely, how does it get its players to play the game rather than endlessly discussing every little move? Or worse, quarterbacking and alpha-playering every little move? Because let’s face it, although these are often issues that can be solved by associating with better friends, they’re also perennial questions that designers and publishers are invested in solving.

Rémond’s solution is a reliable one. It’s also a solution that makes zero thematic sense and transforms an average landing into a white-knuckle Sully Sullenberger ditch into the middle of the Hudson River. Sky Team never acknowledges this. I think that might be my favorite thing about it.

That solution is that your partnership of pilot and copilot are strictly prohibited from communicating. Only after the dice are rolled, that is. Beforehand, you’re allowed to kvetch all you like. Once the dice clatter, it’s time to shut those yaps.

A pleasant, if insubstantial, dice puzzle.

Of course, it hardly matters that you can talk before and after the dice placement phase, because everything comes down to the actual roll. Both pilots get four dice apiece, with which they’re required to accomplish a whole range of actions. Two of these actions, a full half of the dice in play, are mandatory each turn. By pairing one die from both pilot and copilot, the airplane tilts to one side or the other. If the plane isn’t level when it lands, it explodes and everybody dies. Another pair of dice dictates whether the plane flies forward one space, two spaces, or sits in a holding pattern. If the plane hasn’t reached the proper destination at the proper altitude, it explodes and everybody dies.

Really, you will have to work very hard indeed to avoid combustion and death. There are a bunch of airplanes in your flight path. If you don’t radio ahead to get them out of the way, the midair collision presumably results in both airplanes exploding. Also, the other flight was carrying puppies. If you don’t deploy your flaps, landing gear, and brakes, each of which modifies your target speed each round… that’s right. Explosion. Failing to take a few coffee breaks doesn’t spell immediate explosion, but since mugs of coffee are how you modify dice there’s certainly an increased chance. That you’ll explode.

When Sky Team begins, its easygoing relationship with fiery death is absurd, even amusing. As a dice game it’s pleasant enough, if overly constrained when it comes to permitting decisions. It’s only as the game adds new challenges that it comes into its own.

Clearing the lane of bogies. I mean other airplanes.

It begins with hard banking maneuvers. Apparently, certain airports require death-defying turns before anyone can land there. Where before your pilots could simply keep the plane level the entire flight, now you’re trying to work the dice so that they pair with your partner to steer the plane.

Before long, there are additional airplanes popping up in your path. Or your plane sprouts a leaking fuel tank that you can somehow… patch? Stick your finger into the hole, like the little Dutch boy holding back the flood? Or there’s wind, which you need to maneuver against to modulate your speed. Or you’re landing on an icy runway. Or you’re required to play the entire dice phase in under a minute. Or you face the game’s most dire challenge: an intern. He can help out with some tasks, but you’re required to complete his training before the rubber meets the runway.

The arrangement of these challenges resembles that of The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine. Little by little, the difficulty ramps up, adding new quirks. Experienced players will likely find the early scenarios too breezy. We skipped to the yellow levels before we met any resistance. Once it takes off, you’re forced to squeeze the last ounce from every single die. There’s little margin for error.

Which is probably true of real-world pilots too. But there seems to be a crucial distinction between the way we automate and assist modern pilots and the hoops Sky Team chucks you through. While playing, I feel less like this kind of pilot…

The real sky team.

…and more like the Jaeger operators from the award-winning documentary Pacific Rim.

Scratch that — this is the real sky team.

To some degree, it would be natural for my reservations with Sky Team to come down to the preposterousness of its setting. But the clanging dissonance between vaporizing passenger airplanes in order to perform a run-of-the-mill landing is actually one of my favorite things about it. It’s like the L.A. Metro using Speed as a job description for its bus drivers. “Must be able to maintain a speed above 50mph. Must be able to disarm a bomb by climbing along the bus’s underside while back-riding a skateboard. Must exhibit people skills. Starts at $9 per hour with possibility of raise after three months.”

What mutes my appreciation for Sky Team is that its scenarios feel like a checklist of tasks. That’s possibly because most of your dice placements are precisely that — aviation checklists. While certain objectives are exciting, like tilting the plane or negotiating its velocity, others, such as deploying flaps or lowering the landing gear, have all the verve of bureaucratic box-ticking. While it thrives in the negotiated space between players, our roles are largely prescribed. As the copilot, I will never rush to take over the pilot’s duties. I will never break out of my box. Either I get the rolls I need, and can signal that in the proper order, or I won’t. Meanwhile, the dice placement tends toward the obvious. There are exceptions, especially as new challenges are introduced and we’re forced to work around a bad roll, but on the whole it lacks any sense of creativity or organic problem-solving. If the game lasted more than 15 minutes, its straightforwardness would be a curse. Instead, it’s an adequate way to pass a few minutes.

I needed an outro picture.

Adequate. That’s the word for it. On the whole, Sky Team is a perfectly good game. It works. It rids itself of the usual cooperative bugbears, and I’ve had a good time powering through some of its stiffer challenges. I appreciate any game that feeds me challenges over multiple plays, and learning the dimensions of each new problem was a treat.

But after troubleshooting those problems, there isn’t much left over to bring me back. I want to wrestle with my plane, not lower the landing gear again. Sky Team is both things, the exciting near-collision and the repetitive mantra of switching on the fasten seatbelts sign. I prefer the first part. Even in its toughest moments, Sky Team includes too much of the second to hold my attention.

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A complimentary copy was provided.