In the fourth week of class we were scheduled to play the games Can’t Stop and Incan Gold. Unfortunately during the class period my group was unable to play Incan Gold. Fortunately Can’t Stop was really fun to play and had lots of interesting mechanics for a game that broadly looks pretty simple.

In Can’t Stop the goal is to get to the top of three columns by rolling dice 4 dice and determining pairs that help to advance up the columns. What makes this game interesting is that a player can only advance in 3 columns in a turn and can roll the 4 dice as many times as they want or until they can’t advance in any columns anymore. Furthermore, if the player fails to advance in any columns upon rolling the dice they lose all advancements they had made that turn. This mechanic is what makes the game so interesting as well as a great demonstration of an important part of leadership, risk taking.

Risk taking is displayed in this game as players must make a choice to either continue rolling and progress even further at the risk of losing all past progress, or stop rolling and keep what progress they have already made. This decision happens multiple times in a turn for a player with the risk growing greater every time they roll. This is very similar to real life where leaders must assess the risk taken when committing to some action. Leaders do tend to have more control over the outcomes than a person rolling dice as seen in can’t stop though.

Overall I really enjoyed playing this game and had several strategies that I devised while playing. The main strategy that I attempted to use was to commit to as few columns early on in a turn as possible. I did this because it would give me a safety net per say where I could continue to take progress in the other columns without the risk. This strategy doesn’t work for long however as the likelihood that anyone would roll into a specific column multiple times in a row is rather low. In the case where I would get stuck committed to three columns I tried to always have one column I was committed to be in the range of 6-8 as these numbers are the most common to come up when rolling 2 dice, and I was even more likely to get this total on at least one pair when rolling 8 dice.

If I had to recommend this game to people I would say it fits into a category of easy to play and learn while being moderately harder to master. This game has a lot of points where a player can play optimally. However, this game also gives players a chance to win when they aren’t as well aware of these “better” playstyles. I would recommend it to my grandmother personally because she enjoys games that can be played quickly and I believe she would enjoy this kind of game a lot. Overall I think Can’t Stop was a lot of fun to play and would recommend it as a fun game for anyone looking for a quick game to play.