Connecting Flights Review

Connecting Flights from Bazzite Games needs you to get passengers from all over the world back home from their trips. Please note, for this review, I'm only going to discuss the solo/coop game. The game plays over 10 rounds and players must work together in order to empty the board of meeples. Seems simple enough, right? Wrong. In order to get people home, you need four things; a plane, an airport, passengers, and fuel. All of this costs money and depending on the quality the costs will go up. You do not need to provide direct flights, you can grab someone in Rio and send them to Sydney to get more people and send them back to New York. Every round, after flights are completed, more passengers will be added. You'll then collect income and maybe penalties depending on how many people are on the board and where they're located. If you're good, you'll have the board cleared in under 10 rounds.

The Good: Connecting Flights is a really tough puzzle! I love how silly and inconvenient you can make flight paths just to pick up a passenger that you might need. It's a real brain burner that forces you and your partner to work together. It's all about managing what's on the board. I love the way that you build flights by chaining the cards together and having a visual path you can trace is very clever. A nice touch that I don't think I've ever seen before is the space saving side of the board. If you leave it half-folded, the back has the map on a smaller scale for smaller tables.

The Okay: Being penalized means you're going to lose money to start a new round which means you can do less. You can try and mitigate that by fixing things to not get penalized again but I found that I'd reach a point where I couldn't do anything but get deducted because of how much was out on the board at a time. There are various levels of difficulty which essentially just makes things more expensive to do but the economy never felt completely unfair as long as you were doing okay. If you weren't then good luck is all I can say.

The Not So Good: I really can't say I was a huge fan of the fact that on your largest planes, you could only get maybe 2 passengers. A 3 star plane can only hold 3 stars worth of passengers. This makes sense for the gameplay but realistically, I didn't care for it. The game is also littered with randomness. The market puts 4 passengers out at a time and you need to hope that they're ones you can move. You can pay 2 bucks to refresh it but you may wind up refreshing multiple times in a turn. Passengers are also randomly added to the map each round so you never know what's coming to plan ahead for.

Final Thoughts: Connecting Flights as a coop game works really nicely. As a solo game, it's punishingly brutal. The puzzle aspect of it is fantastic but it can be almost too challenging at times. It can feel unbalanced after a certain point and turn into a somewhat fruitless endeavor. For some reason though, I need to beat this game. It's a super engaging puzzle that gives me Pandemic-esque vibes because of how quickly it can spiral on you. It's not a perfect game but something continues to draw me into it.

Thanks to Bazzite Games for providing me with a review copy.