Sky Team vs Competitive Two-Player Games: What Works Better for Couples

Hal and I have been married thirty-one years, and for most of that time a game at our table meant somebody was going to win and somebody was going to hear about it. Then we bought Sky Team in May, and for six months our Friday nights have been the two of us trying to land a plane together instead of trying to beat each other. So here is the short answer. If what you want out of an evening is to feel like you are on the same side, the cooperative game from Scorpion Masqué does that better than any competitive game I have played with my husband. If what you want is a real contest, with a score and a loser and a rematch on Tuesday, a competitive two-player game is still the better tool, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

We kept both, and I think that is the honest answer for most couples. Our competitive game is Jaipur, a two-player trading game Hal picked out in March. The Scorpion Masqué box is the Friday one. Different jobs, different nights. Here is how they split up at our table.

	Sky Team (cooperative)	Competitive two-player games
Who is on your side	Both of you, every round. You land together or you go down together.	Nobody. One of you wins and one of you loses, every single game.
A partner who does not talk much	It cannot be played in silence. Everything you know has to be said out loud.	A whole game can pass with a handful of words.
One of you much better at games	Pilot and co-pilot have different jobs, and neither one can carry the other.	The sharper player usually wins, and after thirty-one years that is Hal more nights than not.
Losing badly	You lose to the dice, not to each other.	Losing to your own husband can put a dent in the rest of the evening.
A winner at the end	Nobody. The plane is down or it is not.	A clean result, and Hal keeps count.
Still interesting after five years	Twenty airports and the optional modules, and we have flown about eight.	Deep enough to sharpen against each other for a decade.
Something to chew over afterwards	You have talked the whole way through, so there is not much left to unpack.	The talk afterwards is half the fun. What you should have played on turn four.
Fits between supper and the ten o'clock news	One landing is a complete evening.	About thirty minutes a game, and stopping at one is the hard part.

You can read that table as a scorecard if you like, and Sky Team comes out ahead on it. What a table cannot show you is the thing that actually changed our Fridays, which is that Hal, who is quiet and does not care for anything that smells like a feelings exercise, started talking at supper about what he should have done with his dice.

Where Sky Team Wins

The win is not subtle. In a competitive game one of you is the obstacle. In this one the dice are the obstacle, and the two of you are on the same side of the table trying to solve them. Friday before last we were one bad roll from the ground. Hal had the dice that would have leveled the wings and I needed them somewhere else entirely, and we spent four solid minutes working out which of us could afford to wait. That is the whole game, over and over, and it is a different feeling than watching your husband take the card you wanted.

We have flown about eight of the twenty airports, and each one changes the shape of the problem a little. Some are tighter on the approach and some hand you a rule you have to work around. The optional modules, the ones with ice on the tarmac and a rookie who needs guidance, we have tried only a couple of times. They make the landing harder in ways that are funny before they are frustrating.

One more thing about the box itself, since people ask me about the pieces. The Scorpion Masqué set is cardboard, and what is in it is a control panel, an airplane axis disc, eight dice, two player aid screens, an altitude track and the approach board. We have played it six months, which is a lot of dice landing on a hard oak table, and nothing has come apart. My one complaint is the player aid screens. They do the job, but they are thin, and I have thought more than once about running them through a laminator. That is the entire list of things I would change about the physical game.

There is a second thing, and it matters more at our age than I expected. Hal does not talk about himself. Thirty-one years and a direct question about his day still gets me the word fine. But you cannot play Sky Team in silence. What you know has to be said out loud, in order, and then you find out whether your partner can use it. He has to tell me what he is holding. I have to tell him where I am thin. By the time the plane is down we have had forty minutes of back-and-forth about something that is not the bills or the schedule, and he never once felt like he was being asked to open up.

The third win is the one I did not see coming. On a bad night, competing makes Hal sulk. He does not shout. He just goes quiet and starts putting the pieces back in the box a little too carefully. You cannot sulk at a crash, because you are both in the wreckage. The first evening we played, back in May, we crashed three times in a row before we landed one. By the third crash we were laughing. If that had been a game of Jaipur, he would have gone to bed.

Where Competitive Two-Player Games Win

Now the other side, and I mean it. A cooperative game is not a contest, and some nights you want a contest. Jaipur gives you a real opponent who is actively trying to beat you, and there is an enjoyment in that which no amount of teamwork replaces. Hal wins a little more than half our games and he knows it. He likes knowing it. On a Tuesday, after a day of keeping a hospital running, he wants to outthink somebody, and I would rather he outthink me than the television.

Replay is the other place competitive games hold up better. Sky Team has twenty airports in the box and optional modules on top of those, and we have flown about eight. That is plenty for six months. I can still see the day we have been everywhere the box can take us. Jaipur is not like that. Eight months in and it still surprises us both, and the two of us getting better at the same thing together is its own kind of long conversation. I played Lost Cities twice at my sister's house and never bought it, mostly because I could not see past Jaipur.

I will give you one from August. Hal got ahead early on the easy trades and I let him, and he spent the rest of the game trying to work out why I had let him. He lost by a handful of points and talked about it for two days. I have never once seen him replay a crash from Sky Team in his head like that.

And there is the score. Sky Team does not keep one. You land or you do not, and then you put the lid on. Jaipur ends with somebody ahead, and while I would not want every night to be about that, there is a reason Hal asks for Tuesday. Being beaten by your husband and beating him back the next week is a thing couples do together, and it has kept us at that table for eight months.

What a Bad Night Looks Like at Our Table

I want to be plain about the sulking, because it is the whole reason I am writing this at all. Back in the spring, before Sky Team, we had a Tuesday that went sideways. Hal had a rough day and lost two games of Jaipur in a row, and by the second one he was not really playing anymore, just moving pieces around. I said something about it. He said he was fine. We watched television in separate chairs. That was the night I went looking for something the two of us could do without a winner.

Sky Team is not a fix for a marriage and I would never sell it as one. It is a game about landing a plane. But it does remove one specific thing from an evening, which is the moment where one of you has to be the loser in front of the other. Some nights that is the right friction to have. Some nights it is the last thing you need.

We crashed three times in a row before we landed one, and by the third crash we were both laughing.

The other thing a cooperative game does is make losing cheap. We have had nights where the dice simply would not cooperate and we went down on the final approach. Nobody's feelings were involved. We put the lid on, one of us said we would get it next time, and both of us meant it. I cannot say that about every game in the basket.

One caveat on the cooperative side, because no game is free of trouble. A cooperative game can turn into one person telling the other what to do. If your partner is the type to take the dice out of your hand, this one will hand him a reason. What kept it from happening at our table is that I am the pilot and Hal sits in the co-pilot seat, so neither of us can fly the other one's half.

How We Decide on the Night

People ask how we choose. It is not complicated. If Hal had a day that made him tired in the shoulders, it is Sky Team, because the game does the talking for us. If he had a day that made him tired in the head, it is Jaipur, because he can beat me at something and go to bed feeling like the day did not win. If it is Sunday and the house is too quiet, that is a different box altogether, and it is not a game. It is a deck of questions, and we take turns drawing until one of us says that is enough for tonight.

The point is that neither of these is the right one for every night, and a couple who buys one of them expecting it to cover everything will be disappointed by February. What Sky Team did for us was fill a gap we did not have a name for. There were already plenty of ways to compete. There was no easy way to spend an hour on the same side.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy Sky Team first if your evenings have gone quiet, if one of you is competitive and the other is not, or if the phrase let us play a game has started to sound like an invitation to an argument. It is two players, ages 12 and up, it comes in a box small enough to take on a trip, and it asks the two of you to talk to each other for the better part of an hour. If that sounds like homework, I understand. It sounded like homework to Hal right up until the first time we crashed and both of us started laughing.

Buy a competitive two-player game, Jaipur or something like it, if you are both comfortable with a scoreboard and neither one of you carries a loss to bed. If your partner sulks, competitive games will show you that faster than anything else you can put on a table. That is useful information and a bad Friday night, and only you know which one you can afford. If you already know the answer to that question, you probably already know which box you should be buying.

Most couples I know end up with both, the way we did, and I would not talk anybody out of the competitive one. The wicker basket on our sideboard holds five boxes. Two are for talking, one is for laughing, one is for competing, and one, the Scorpion Masqué box, is for the nights when we need to be on the same side of something instead of across from each other.