Spaceteam (2012) is a puzzle communication game where players pilot a spaceship, each with their own control panel on their smartphone or tablet screen. The switches, dials, sliders and levers are labelled with randomly-generated peculiar names: ‘Astral Synth’, ‘Gripvent’, ‘Starmesh’, and ‘Autospoon’. To avoid crashing, the team must follow commands within a few seconds. ‘Set the Astral Synth to 5’, for example. The twist is that the instructions on one screen may be for switches on another player’s control panel. The challenge is to communicate this quickly enough to other players trying to do the same. It’s a communication challenge that is not only entertaining but can be used to teach foreign languages.

This game quickly descends into shouting and then the ship crashes. Teams need to come up with ways to communicate in order to avoid this if they are going to do well.

There is an updated version called Spaceteam VR for Oculus, PC and PlayStation VR, where you play in a virtual spaceship. It has the same pressing buttons and pulling levers gameplay but you do it with a headset on. Because it's on more flexible hardware it can offer a wider range of game modes.


It means you can collaborate to pilot your ship in three different ways:

• Online VR Multiplayer: Up to six players, connected to the internet, in any popular VR headset join in a cooperative game of trying to avoid their binding doom.
• Local Mobile Multiplayer: Up to six players, play locally with at least one VR headset and connected smart devices, this offers an experience much like the original Spaceteam game. In the VR game, each mobile player is represented by a robot.
• Single Player: If you don’t have any friends around or there's no one online you want to play with, head to Practice Mode and you and two of our trusty robots will form your Spaceteam.

Our examiner, Andy Robertson, first checked Spaceteam 3 years ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 5 weeks ago.