Category: Board Games

I have played a lot of Sky Team over the last few weeks. Games of Sky Team mostly happen when my co-pilot (and actual game owner) asks me if I want to play, and I respond with a half-hearted “Sure.”

Outside of our first flight, I have never deliberately visited my friend in order to play Sky Team. We find our way into the cockpit every time we run out of things to do or talk about, and don’t particularly feel like playing a competitive game.

The game’s general simplicity and short playtime mean that despite my general lack of enthusiasm for taking to the air, I’m never really opposed to it.

Let’s start with that simplicity. Every round, you and your teammate each roll 4 dice, and then you take turns placing them onto a semi-split board. EYour dice pool is secret, and you cannot talk to your partner during the round.

Slots are color coded, specific to each player. Speed and axis must be filled each round by each player, leaving your other two dice to be used for a variety of other problems, such as other planes in your path, flipping the variety of switches that will allow the plane to land, and dealing with an untrained intern.

The actual game is a fine dance of probability and signaling. Can my teammate deal with the plane we are about to crash into? Can I slot a six into our axis freeing up my 3 to signal traffic out of the way? Or will doing so throw us directly into a tailspin?

All of this stands against the ever ticking clock: you have a limited amount of fuel, and must reach your destination before the final turn with all flaps down, and at a slow enough speed that we don’t run ourselves directly into the airport Cinnabon.

As the difficulty levels crank up, additional challenges have been thrust upon us. We must dodge mountains must by manipulating the axis meter within a specific range. A greedy kerosene gauge loses fuel if it isn’t plugged with a dice to minimize the loss. There is an intern. I’m not sure why we’re letting them fly the plane, or why failing to train them is as catastrophic to our success as doing a 360 no-scope directly into Kathmandu, but I don’t make the rules here.

Despite all of the additions and add-ons, I’ve never found myself excited by Skyteam with the level of either enthusiasm I had for Clank: Acquisitions Incorporated, or in retrospect, the curiosity I had for Lost Ruins of Arnak.

Instead, Skyteam is just kind of there.

It feels odd to be so ambivalent about a game that I’ve played so much of, and also is the winner of the Spiel, but here I am. I’ll play it. I’ll do my best to enjoy it. I’ll be impressed by its thoughtful mechanics, and absolutely brilliant box and component design. But I’ll never feel inspired or enthused by it.

Post Script: It’s not entirely true that Sky Team elicits zero emotional reaction from me, but the sole example of a time when it did is neither flattering to me or the game.

During one session, I came up with the idea of a 9/11 themed expansion for Sky Team. Obviously, this hard to justify for a variety of reasons.

But the one that made me laugh, and laugh and laugh, was the thought that it would be a very easy expansion, as landing would no longer be required.

I enjoy co-op campaign games. As a result, after finishing up Arkham Horror, I was looking for something new. It was then that I saw a writeup from Dan Thurot on War Story: Occupied France. Sure, a World War Two choose your own adventure sort of thing is a bit out of the usual wheelhouse, but it seemed like it would be worth giving a shot.

On the whole, I have quite mixed feelings on War Story. I think I can explain them (and the rest of the game) best by first pulling the box quote from BGG.

Through three replayable story missions, you must exploit the specialties of your chosen agents to uncover information, enlist allies, and obtain weaponry. Engage occupying forces on tactical encounter maps where careless positioning could cost your agents’ lives. Remember, no plan survives contact with the enemy…and time is running out.

Let’s start with those “three replayable story missions.” Yes, there are three of them. Yes, they are missions. Are they replayable?

I would not call them that. As the box also says, much of what we spent our time doing was simply gathering information. Playing again while knowing what and where the Nazi forces are up to feels like it would somewhat defeat the point. After all, it is a choose your own adventure booklet.

Perhaps the game has an elaborate branching path system, but by the time we finished mission 3, we had a pretty good sense of all three ways we COULD have finished our objective, even if we did only focus on one of them.

That said, the general missions and choices they present are fun, tense and exciting.

I would not say the same about the tactical encounter maps.

I’m going to be honest: the gunfights feel like a crapshoot, and there were at least two instances where we got absolutely screwed by the system. That’s not to say there aren’t choices, but often the choices boil down to trying to read the game text about the tactical maps for clues.

And many times, it just feels like those clues aren’t there. A choice with no information is the same as a random selection, and random selection isn’t agency. To the quote the box for a final time “no plan survives contact with the enemy,” and no, our plans did not. Instead, the gunfights feel like a matter of asking “Are you willing to spend gun tokens to avoid the worst case outcome on this check?” twelve or so times in a row.

Either way, I don’t think it’s something that would have annoyed me if it wasn’t for a larger problem I have with tone.

Now this might just be a me problem. My friend didn’t have it, and I believe Dan Thurot had a sort of opposite experience to mine. But it’s my writeup, so I’m going to talk about it here.

To me it feels like there are two very different types of story trying to co-exist in War Story. The first is a sort of grim, intense insurgency narrative, with all the things associated with said narrative.

Life is cheap, the enemy is endless, and while your actions are impactful in the grand scheme of things, they will also lead to death and torture for others around you. There are morally grey choices, and whether you are a terrorist or freedom fighter is ultimately going to be decided by if your side wins.

This attempts to sit side by side with a sort of heroic myth thing. The primary enemy is a literal cigar smoking Kriminalkommissar Nazi, who the first two acts spend significant time building up. There is extended narrative time spent on a few “Face” characters who show up, but don’t actually spend much time as part of the story, like the albino toymaker.

Perhaps this is just the result of it being a choose your adventure story. Dan was darkly delighted at a moment when he was confronted with a treacherous informant, and given the choice of killing this person, lying to them, or trying to buy them off. I was equally frustrated when upon encountering a child of a German soldier or potentially SS Officer, I was not given the option to shoot the child.

This was not a choice I was enthusiastic about, but it did feel like a key moment where I would be confronted with the fact that in order to reach my objectives, I would have to make some heinous choices. Instead, we just distracted him and he ran off.

It was an oddly dissonant feeling, and one that has stuck with me since then.

It’s an interesting experience, but playing it by the book it felt frustrating at times, and frankly I don’t see how it could possibly be replayable. Would I play another game in the series? Maybe, but only if someone else was footing the bill.

I don’t really recommend or not recommend War Story. If someone told me they were thinking about playing it, I think the first thing I would say is that I’d love to hear their thoughts after they finish.

The second would be to ask if they wanted to buy my copy.