Can’t Stop – First Impressions

Late night in the bar saw myself, Gaz and Rich breaking out Rich’s copy of Can’t Stop, something of a classic game that I had never had the opportunity to play.

Can’t Stop is a game that sees each player with a number of coloured tokens and 3 white tokens to place each round. Each round you roll 4 six sided dice and form them into two pairs leaving you with two seperate totals. You then put one of your white meeples on each of the numbers you’ve rolled. If you have rolled the same number twice then you can place a meeple and move it one forward up the ladder.

Before it begins

You then have a choice. You can pick the dice up and roll again, placing white meeples if you still have any and moving those you already have on the table in the matching columns. Or, you can stop and place your coloured meeples on the spots for the white meeple. This choice continues until you choose to stop or you fail to roll any numbers that would allow you to place a white meeple or move one of them. If you do fail then all your progress is lost!

I turned out to be pretty good at this!

This game is the Push your Luck mechanic absolutely boiled down to it’s simplest possible interpretation, much as Skull is the Bluff mechanic at it’s most pure. Harder to get numbers have smaller ladders than easier to get so their is a lot to think about with the numbers you choose to make. Their is a lot of pleasure in watching others roll, the look on their faces as they pick up the dice and consider just one more go!

Playable in minutes, taught in seconds and loads of fun you can see why this is on so many classic list of games.