Two of us, one plane, no talking allowed

Somebody left this on the shelf at the after-shift spot back in the spring, still shrinkwrapped, and I grabbed it mostly because the box was small enough to fit next to my knife roll. One player’s the pilot, the other’s the co-pilot, and together you’re trying to land the plane over seven rounds, unless you fail before that. Designer’s Luc Rémond, it’s from Hachette, and once you’ve got the rules down a full landing runs fifteen, twenty minutes, which matters more to me than it probably should. It’s extremely easy to set up and tear down, and that’s not nothing on a night when I’ve been on my feet since three.

The hook is you roll your dice, keep them secret from each other, and once they’re rolled you don’t get to discuss values, just place them one at a time and hope the other person’s reading the board the way you are. It’s a bit of push your luck and a bit of mind reading, and that’s the whole tension of it. First few plays we crashed hard, laughing about it, and there’s something genuinely tense about watching your co-pilot hover over the board with a die in hand and no way to ask what’s wrong. That’s the one spot where I’d flag it for anybody who runs hot on AP: the sitting-in-silence rule makes normal hesitation feel like an eternity, and it’s funny, in a bad way, watching someone break it with a long stare and no words to go with it.

Downtime’s basically nonexistent though, since you’re both placing simultaneously, not sitting around waiting on a turn order. Components are nice, sliders and all, though the slider pieces tend to pop out of position if you bump the table wrong, and once the box is opened you’re on your own for keeping the little fiddly bits from getting lost, no real system for it in there. Thematically it doesn’t hold up, no real pilot and co-pilot would sit there mute, but I figure it’s supposed to read as the heat of the moment, no time to talk, and I’ve stopped minding. Good weeknight game. Keeps coming back off the shelf.