Your First Three Flights of Sky Team

Your first three flights of Sky Team are where a crew finds its habits. Some crashes come from rules played slightly wrong, because nobody had the booklet open. Others come from legal choices that cost you the landing three rounds later. This lesson covers both, checked against the Landing Procedure booklet. If you need the rules first, start with how to play Sky Team.

Rules slips to catch early

Counting the Radio from the wrong space. Your Current Position counts as 1. A die of 2 removes a plane from the next space ahead, not two spaces ahead. Miscount and you clear the wrong plane while the dangerous one stays put.

Thinking a plane in your space is a crash. Planes can move into your Current Position and nothing happens. You only collide if you have to move forward while a plane is still there. A plane in your space is a warning, and a 1 on the Radio clears it.

Resetting the Axis. The tilt stays from round to round. If you ended round 2 two marks toward the Pilot, round 3 starts there.

Forgetting the mandatory dice. Each player must put one die on the Axis and one on the Engines every round. They do not have to be your first dice, but if a round ends with one missing, you lose on the spot.

Placing Flaps or Brakes out of order. Flaps go top to bottom, starting with the 1/2 space. Brakes go 2, then 4, then 6. Landing Gear is the only system you can build in any order.

Playing on a green Switch and expecting a move. A die on a Landing Gear or Flaps space whose Switch already shows green does nothing. The marker does not move again.

Wrapping coffee. Coffee changes a die by 1 per token, but never past 1 or 6. A 6 plus 1 stays a 6.

Hoarding the Reroll token for one player. When anyone spends it, both players may reroll any dice still behind their screens, once each.

Talking about dice in the briefing. “Save your 1 for the Radio” is dice talk, and it is out. “That plane in space 2 has to go this round” is a plan, and it is fine.

The landing slips

Building brakes too late. In the final round, your speed is checked against the Brake marker the moment the second Engines die goes down. A brake placed after that does not count for the landing.

Reading the speed rule as “equal is fine.” Your speed must be lower than the Brake marker. One brake only lets you land with two 1s on the Engines, the lowest speed there is. The booklet’s own example lands at a speed of 3 with the 2 and 4 brakes built.

Leaving a Switch red. All three Landing Gear and all four Flaps must show green at the end. In the final round each of you has only two dice beyond the Axis and the Engines, so a player who arrives with three red Switches on their side cannot fix them all.

The big strategic mistake: the Axis as an afterthought

New crews treat the Axis as a chore to fill with whatever die is left. Then both players hold back for their last die, the gap is 4, and the plane spins. The rulebook’s own tips call it “extremely risky” for both players to wait until their last die.

The Axis is also forgiving. Many values work there, and the plane does not need to be level until the final round. So one of you places an Axis die early, and the other answers it. That one habit prevents most first-game spins. Lesson 4 looks at it closely.

Spending dice on far-away planes

A plane five spaces ahead feels like a problem. It is not one yet. The tips in the rulebook put it plainly: clearing space 1 or 2 is important, and space 5 much less so. A Radio die on a distant plane in round 1 is a die that did not build coffee, gear, or flaps.

Clear what is close. Plan for what is far.

Flaps first, distance never

The flaps feel like progress, so new Co-Pilots build them early. Each flap moves the orange marker up, and once all four are out, moving 2 spaces is no longer possible. If the track is long and you are behind, early flaps can leave you short of the runway when the altitude runs out.

The fix is to look at the Approach Track in every briefing: how many spaces are left, and how many rounds? If you need distance, hold the flaps.

A checklist for flight three

Before each round’s roll, say three things out loud:

1. How many spaces do we want to move: 0, 1, or 2?
2. Which plane, if any, has to go this round?
3. What is still red for the landing?

Those three questions come straight from the briefing advice at the back of the Landing Procedure, and they turn a quiet round into a shared plan. For why this kind of game keeps one player from taking over, see our piece on the quarterback problem in cooperative games.