Skybridge
- Board's Eye View
- 8 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Designed by Michael Rieneck and Franz Vohwinkel - who also did all of the artwork, including the unique illustrations on every card - Skybridge is a fantasy-themed card-driven board game published by Pegasus Spiele and Deep Print Games. It was one of the games introduced by Pegasus Spiele at Spiel Essen 2025.
Skybridge has a fantasy world setting but if it had been set in space it would've involved travel to the surface of a Dyson Sphere because in this game the players are living in the centre of a world but they are together embarked on a project to build a bridge to the outer surface that surrounds them. Alternatively, think of it as the bridge between worlds represented by the radio tower in Season 5 of Stranger Things.
Tho' the 2-4 players are collectively engaged in building the bridge, Skybridge is a competitive rather than cooperative game. Players start off with their own character with an asymmetric ability and they draft cards from the five different colour decks. The cards have an icon on them that shows the location to which they can be played on a player's tableau board. Playing a card to an icon in this way lets you trigger all the cards in your tableau but if you play a card to an icon that already has a card on it, you'll be covering up and therefore effectively replacing that card, tho' there are ways of subsequently reordering your card stack. You're incentivised for drafting particular colour cards because each gives you a specific bonus.
Advancing along the board allows you to build garrisons which give you victory points. And you can build a stage of the bridge provided you can satisfy its resource requirements. Other players can likewise contribute to that stage of the bridge but only if they do so in the same round. As you would guess, you get points for building a stage of the bridge. The stages are increasingly expensive, and a custom six-sided die is rolled to determine which further resource is needed in addition to those printed on the bridge stage tile.
The bridge doubles as a game timer and one that isn't wholly under the players' control. If none of the players build the next stage, it gets built anyway but none of the players get the points. As the bridge advances so additional cards come into play, including powerful god cards. Provided you have the icons that allow them to play them to your tableau, these let you score at the end of the game for cards in the corresponding stacks.
We've enjoyed Skyridge at all player counts. The game plays briskly so the 60-90 minutes on the box is about right. Because it's card driven, no two plays are likely to follow quite the same path, and the game comes with alternative player boards on their flipside, so adding to Skybridge's replayability. And if you get hooked by the theme, we hear Franz Vohwinkel has a Skybridge book trilogy in the pipeline...
