Flying’s easy. Landing not so much. It’s a team effort at least. Sky Team, a cooperative dice game, asks exactly two players to work together, to overcome the game’s challenge. Much as is the case in landing an actual plane, it’s what happens in the background that’s actually remarkable.

Playing Sky Team is unexpectedly simple. There are no innovative dice mechanisms, you need to figure out during your first few plays. Roll dice behind your screen. Take turns placing them on the designated spaces on your shared game board. Then you move a marker or two around.

There are also no unorthodox and newly invented ways to coordinate your actions. You’re not allowed to communicate during a round. In between rounds only general statements are permitted. Without any fuss, the game’s challenge to us takes shape. We have to observe the actions of the other player, and deduce our most useful option. We have a shared goal, but in order to reach it, we first have to overcome a few hurdles.

It’s here at the latest, that it becomes apparent that Sky Team is the product of some very clear-eyed design considerations. At all times, the legibility of the current game state takes top priority. Most of what you need to make an informed decision is easily found on the shared board. The rest is summarized in clear language inside your personal player screen. This reduces mental load during play. You can focus entirely on what to do and what your team mate does.

This results in an experience that falls into place very fast. Admittedly, Sky Team doesn’t wow you with innovation. But this only goes to show that the feeling of experiencing something new only hints at a well-made game. It’s rarely the reason for it being so. The rules volume is similarly not minimalized enough, to fascinate its players through sher elegance. But the rules are grounded in their theme and thanks to the game’s visual information, they are quickly recalled during play. Sky Team’s presentation is not its unique selling point. Even if, it too, is evidence of highly competent designcraft.

Sky Team shines because it observes a fundamental virtue of game design: It presents a challenging, but surmountable task. The afore-mentioned rules as well as the use-oriented presentation work towards this goal. The game’s basics seem familiar. Six-sided dice and easily recognizable places to place them. But Sky Team also feels challenging. Markers, arrows and designated areas on the board evoke impressions of the complex mechanical layout you’d find in the cockpit of a commercial airplane.

The actual game picks up this idea and builds on it. We soon have a handle on our tools (the dice), but the hurdles we have to overcome look anything but trivial. Yet, no matter how successful our attempts are, we end up trying to land our plane again and again. But the reasons why Sky Team is so gripping and rewarding, go beyond the game itself.

One of the most relevant and important insights games can communicate is that we all depend on each other. That we exist as part of a community and our actions affect others. By extension other people’s decisions similarly impact our ability to choose freely.

In competitive games we are repeatedly encouraged to strive towards independence; to free us from having our plans curtailed by what others do. At the same time we have to gather enough influence to, in turn, limit the aspirations of others. Only then, can we be crowned winner at the end of the game. They are games that serve a painfully adolescent understanding of self and community. We get upset at our opponents for limiting our options for their own gain. It’s a similar emotional response we have to when our parents forced us to do chores, before we could have any fun.

Put simply: competitive games are (among other things) always a retreat into the juvenile struggle for more self-determination. In games against other players we reach back to the emotional framework of an adolescent, wanting to stand up for ourselves and to prove others wrong. Accordingly, with the rise of cooperative games the medium began its long overdue maturing process. We no longer push back against each other, but instead experience the self-efficacy of the group. Our identity as a group is no longer borne out of sorting each other into winners, losers and any number of roles inbetween. Instead we define ourselves by our shared goals and efforts. The key to culture is always solidarity, and in cooperative play this is what we practice.

Sky Team isn’t concerned with exemplifying these differences. But it helps to keep them in mind to understand why Sky Team is such a gratifying game to play. You don’t play Sky Team “against” some instance like an automated opponent. You also don’t feel as if you’re going up against some deviously clever challenges some designer has thought up. As you might do in some escape room-style games. Sky Team’s thematic draping doesn’t even allow for an “opponent”. There is no adversary trying to force a humiliating defeat on us. As mentioned before, landing isn’t that easy. Neither the airport, the landing site, the other planes or even the weather are invested in seeing us fail. Everybody at the table is on our side.

It’s this unreserved support and trust we’re given, that makes play so uplifting. The focus is wholly on the person sitting across from us. We want to see them excel, just as much as they want to see us. It is this back and forth that makes Sky Team such a motivating and fulfilling game to play. Even if landing isn’t always easy. Lifting each other up isn’t that hard.