Tag Archives: Can’t Stop

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Incan Gold and Can’t Stop

This week we played two games, Incan Gold and Can’t Stop. My group used Board Game Arena to play the games. This software was the easiest by far in this class to play the games. When we were on our third or fourth game of Incan Gold, some of the other groups were just finishing setting up the games. Both of these games involve taking risks. We first started the session by playing Incan Gold and then switched to Can’t Stop. My group seemed to have the most fun playing Can’t Stop. Our final round of Can’t Stop was amazing! One of our players was able to win the game in one round without anyone else playing a single coin. We were all rooting for him to complete that and win the game. He used a very risky choice when he chose the 9 column for one of his choices. In the end it played out, and I was so happy for him.

I honestly can think of anything that was hard for the games. The games were very easy to understand and play. Board game Arena was by far easier to use then TableTop Simulator. There were times where group members had to wait a bit to get into the game due to Board Game Arena giving everyone a bunch of achievements for playing games, but we were still able to play a bunch more rounds than other groups.

Both Incan Gold and Can’t Stop are risk taking games. In leadership, you have to take risks at times. However, you also have to realize that your idea of risks may not be what your group wants or needs. You have to be understanding of your risk and make sure the benefits of said risk overcome what the disadvantages could be. If you take too many risky decisions with no benefits, you have failed yourself as a leader. Being a leader requires you to be able to make hard decisions that may require some form of risk.

When learning how to play the games for this week, I played them with my boyfriend. He loved playing Can’t Stop. We would play so many rounds because he loved it so much. He is a lot more of a risk taker than me and always went for the 2s and 12s. I would recommend both Ican Gold and Can’t Stop to all of my friends.

Game of the Week: Incan Gold and Can’t Stop

A week or so ago, we played Incan Gold and Can’t Stop in class, and overall, I enjoyed both games. The theme that week was weighing risk vs. reward, and man, did I feel that. For a leader, considering risk vs. reward is an essential skill to learn because the risk impacts the whole group, but then again, so can the reward. Being placed in a position of leadership, one must toe the line very carefully. You might have to be more reserved than you might typically be to protect the group from harm. In a game sense, Incan Gold and Can’t Stop both emulate, risking it all for a sweet reward.

Incan Gold bursts to the seams with an Indiana Jones aesthetic. The premise is that a team of archaeologists/grave robbers are excavating/plundering an Incan temple for all it is worth. Throughout five rounds, the players delve as far as they can go into the temple, picking up emeralds, obsidian shards, gold nuggets, and the occasional artifact while also trying not to trigger any of the traps of the temple. As the players progress into the temple, they leave small amounts of treasure behind, and thus, the game’s strategic elements become apparent. The first person to flee the temple picks up all the leftover treasure. The further into the temple everyone goes, the more treasure is collected overall, but more traps can trigger. When the second type of trap comes up, any player in the temple loses everything they have gained on that round. The question becomes to delve or not to delve? Incan Gold was a lot more fun for me, even though I ultimately lost. My downfall came from me playing too safe. I was often the first to run back before my two companions would stumble upon a huge score. Can’t Stop, on the other hand, was a very different story.

The version of Can’t Stop that we played looked like it had not changed since its initial debut in the 1980s, but what Can’t Stop lacks in an aesthetic flair it makes up in pure strategy. The players roll dice to determine how quickly they climb up the board. A player wins by having three of their markers reach the top of three separate columns. Each round, after a player moves 3 markers, they can choose to stay or roll again. If the player stays, then their tokens advance to the markers, but if they roll again, they risk the chance to bust and lose all progress. After coming off of my complete defeat in Incan Gold, I decided to throw caution to the wind and go for broke. It was this reckless strategy, coupled with lucky dice rolls, that played me in the lead by the time we had to stop playing. Can’t Stop is my grandparents’ speed much more than Incan Gold because it is not bogged down by complication. The simplicity of the gameplay is Can’t Stop’s key to its longevity.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection 6: Incan Gold and Can’t Stop

This week in Tabletop Leadership we played Incan Gold and Can’t Stop. I think these games are my favorite this semester so far. They were both easy to learn, easy to play, and a lot of fun. They both had risk taking aspects which was why I enjoyed them so much. I like the feeling of being reckless and potentially getting rewarded out of it. I don’t think there was anything hard about the game. I think my family would enjoy Incan Gold very much, including my Niece, because it is easy to learn and we can get a lot of laughs out of it.

The session went really well because my playmates enjoyed both games as well. Personally, I liked Incan Gold better because it had a theme. Can’t Stop was fun because you can take risks but I would often get bored when it wasn’t my turn. I would definitely recommend Incan Gold to my friends and family because we can play it in a party setting. It doesn’t have much strategy or cognitive thinking going on, while Can’t Stop definitely has a lot of strategy with numbers.

Both of these games tie to leadership because being a leader involves taking risks. I found myself in a lot of high risk / high reward situations. In Incan Gold, I would often step up and be the only one furthering my adventure and I got 17 gems all to myself because of that. In Can’t Stop, I didn’t do so well because I wanted to take risks like the first game but refusing to stop left me back to where I started. In leadership, it is good to take risks for a high reward, but if you get too risky you can lose a lot of progress.

Game of the Week Blog Reflection: Incan Gold and Can’t Stop

This week, we played two games during the class session. They are called Incan Gold and Can’t stop. For the Incan Gold, the whole round has five small rounds, for each small round, players will decide to continue their adventure to gain more golds or quit to make sure they do not lose their golds for this small round. After these five small rounds, the player who owns the most golds win the game. For the Can’t stop, players had to roll four dices and add each two of them up as they want. Players will move their pawns based on the numbers (sum) they get, each number has a column and the player who reaches the top of any three number’s columns will win the game.

During the class session, our group first played the game Incan Gold. I think the hardest point of playing Incan Gold is you need to think whether to take risks to gain more golds or quite to maintain your golds, and you also need to think what other players will do. For example, in the second small round, one of our group members decided to quit when we met the first hurdle, because the rule is if you met the same hurdle twice, you will die and you will lose all the golds you gain during this small round. Me and another player decided to continue until we met the second hurdle, but this is not the same as the first hurdle. So, another group member decided to quit because we already met two different hurdles, and the risk of continuing becomes double. However, I am a person who likes to take risks, so I chose to continue, fortunately I gained 11 more golds in the next scene, since I was the only player left, I got all the 11 golds. However, on the fourth round, I lost all my golds for the round because I took the risks.

For the game Can’t stop, I think the hardest point is also to make a good strategy of taking risks. In this game, there are some short columns like 2 and 12 which only have 3 or 4 steps to win, but 2 and 12 are very difficult to get. There are also some long columns like 6,7, and 8, which need 8,9 or 10 steps to win. So, making a good strategy about the combination of high-risk columns and low-risk columns are very important. One of our group members did a great job on this, he chose the columns of 4, 8, and 12, which included high-risk column (12), low-risk column (8) and the middle-risk column (4), and he won this game during the session.

I think these two games went very well in our group. We all had a great time during the class sessions. As the same of other classmates said, I also think that Incan gold might be a little bit more interesting than Can’t stop since it has a sense adventure but not just count the sum of two dices.

I think the leadership aspects of these two games are the ability to keep calm thought and the courage to take risks. As a leader, you must keep a calm thought when you make choices because your decisions will influence not only you but the people around you. Leaders should always make the choices based on the situation they are in, so it is important to keep calm when you make choices. A leader also needs to have the courage to take risks when it is necessary, because leaders should always take the responsibility of failure.

Game of the Week Blog: Incan Gold and Can’t Stop

This week in class we played two relatively quick games, Incan Gold and Can’t Stop. Incan Gold is a multiplayer card game that is perfect for those that love to take risks and push their luck. To play you shuffle the deck and someone deals by flipping over a card revealing either a trap or treasure. Each player then splits the treasure they gain and then on the count of three everyone decides whether or not they want to push their luck and continue deeper into the temple for more treasure and artifacts or bail out with whatever they had. Can’t Stop is a mixture between a dice and a board game because you roll the dice to move your pawns on the board and the goal is to take over three columns. However, it is also a kind of risky game because if you don’t roll the numbers you need you cannot complete your turn and it is a race between other players.

The hardest part of Incan Gold was trying to maintain a realistic and logical mindset because similar to poker the game becomes addictive really fast and you begin not to carefully weigh out the risk to benefit ratio when playing. One of the players in my group constantly played it safe while the rest of us kept risking our loot in the hopes of gaining more, because of this the safe player ended up winning both of the rounds we played. So I definitely need to work on my strategy for that game! The hardest part of Can’t Stop was trying to be present while playing because I did not like this game at all. It’s basically just a math and chance game with no story or plotline and because it was boring I didn’t care whether I won or lost which is not something you want when playing. I would recommend Incan Gold to everyone and Can’t Stop to maybe my grandparents if I had to.

I think the two biggest leadership aspects in this week’s games would be decisiveness and integrity. For example, In Incan Gold, all the players need to decide at the same time if they are bailing or continuing deeper into the temple. If you cannot demonstrate the ability to make decisions under extreme pressure you cannot be a great leader and you are also not helping maintain the easy playing flow of the game. A clear example of integrity can be found once again in Incan Gold, everyone wants to win and I witnessed players make their decisions based upon what they thought another player was going to do. One player in my group made the decision to bail out because he knew the player who always played it safe was going to do that as well and in doing this he would ensure that no one got the treasures. Some would argue that it was simply strategy but I would argue that it calls your character into question when you would knowingly choose to lose just to stop someone from winning or gaining more from an opportunity than you.

Game of the Week: Incan Gold/Can’t Stop

For the session this week we played two “quick” games about luck in small groups. The first game was Can’t Stop, which is a game involving dice where you keep pressing your luck to roll the number(s) needed to advance up the rows you’re in. However, you can press your luck too far and end up with nothing you can use and get reset to the beginning. The second game was Incan Gold. This is a game where you go through a dungeon with your team and try to collect the most amount of treasure while not encountering two of the same trap.

Our play session went pretty well for these games. The one issue we had though, was time constraint. We played a few games of Can’t Stop, but didn’t have enough time to finish our game of Incan Gold. For Can’t Stop, I won the first game, but after that I kept losing and kept falling back down after pressing my luck too far. For Incan Gold, I was the one that kept going through the dungeon and wound up with the most treasure at the end. Out of the two, Incan Gold was my favorite, and I think my little brother would really like this game.

Risk taking is a big part of these games. I was hesitant when we first started playing to keep taking risks, but after I won my first game of Can’t Stop, I felt less hesitant and went for it more. Each time I had a successful round, it made me want to keep pushing my luck. However, the hardest part was making myself keep pushing the limits when I constantly kept losing. I think this is incredibly similar to how you approach leadership. One of the qualities of being a leader is being willing to take risks. They might not always work out, but it’s important to keep trying and not give up.

Game of the Week: Can’t Stop/Incan Gold

This week we played two board games in class. The first one is a classic game called Can’t Stop, with very simple rules. You roll dice and advance on the board based on the sum of the dice you roll. After each roll, you can choose to stop and secure your progress or roll again. If you roll but have nowhere to advance to, you lose all progress for that round.

The second game this week was Incan Gold. It was a similar risk/reward type of game, but in an entirely different style. Incan Gold relies heavily on the narrative and aesthetics of explorers plundering an Incan temple for riches. Cards are drawn from a deck to determine whether your explorer finds treasure or dangerous hazards. Find too many hazards, and you lose all your collected treasure. The first explorer to leave gets to take an extra share of the treasure that has been discovered up to that point, but they miss out on any future discoveries.

Of the two games, I vastly preferred Can’t Stop. The turn-based gameplay went much more smoothly over the internet, and was quick enough to be fun and engaging. Incan Gold had more complex rules and timing that was difficult to adequately recreate on Tabletop Simulator. Even aside from the colonialist narrative that it perpetuates, the gameplay just wasn’t as interesting or fun for me.

The one thing that both of these games had in common was the concept of chance. It was impossible to win or even play either without taking some amount of risk. I know myself to be very risk-averse, so I was not particularly looking forward to this week. However, the low stakes and controlled atmosphere of these games gave me a chance to step out of my comfort zone slightly, and I really enjoyed it! Taking risks is an essential aspect of leadership, and activities like these can help get new leaders comfortable with small risks so that they’re prepared to face much bigger ones.

Can’t Stop

For this week of class, we were given two games to play; Can’t Stop and Incan Gold. For our group, we exclusively played Can’t Stop because Incan Gold was apparently not working correctly in board game arena. To summarize this session, there was three of us playing multiple games of Can’t Stop and there was a decent amount of enjoyment throughout. Everybody was able to win at least one game in the session, so it felt like everybody was on an even level.

I found this game to be very fun, personally. It was a good time sink and very easy to understand the game. Board game arena did make the game a bit easier because you do not have to actually do the math in your head on what your possible choices are. Compare that to playing in a regular setting, I would have to run through all of the possible decisions in my head every time I roll, so while this does make the game a bit easier it does help simplify the game and make it go faster. I think my favorite part about the game is that there is enough random elements in the game to make it so it’s possible for everybody to win, but also allows room for strategy within the randomness.

This game ties into leadership through the way people account for random elements and how you react to them. Understanding how to deal with situations where you may not be comfortable or completely prepared is important, and sometimes it may backfire against you even if you make a good decision.

Free Play (Week 1)

For our first week of free play, I ended up playing Can’t Stop again with one other classmate, Boran. We had a 1v1 duel marathon of Can’t Stop. It got very competitive at times and we both enjoyed playing. It was a close race for the first half hour, but I ended winning 4 or 5 games in row after that to give myself quite the lead over my opponent. I think I may have just gotten really lucky since both Boran and I were utilizing similar strategy of trying to be the first to take the middle lanes of 6,7 and 8. Nonetheless, it was competitive throughout and we ended up cranking out games in like 4-8 minutes spans. It was a complete rapid fire pace of play since it was just the two of us.

I kind of saw myself as a leader in this game because I had already won so many games in the previous session of Can’t Stop. I felt like I knew exactly what i was doing entering the game. I also tried giving Boran advice when he went for risky plays with numbers like 2, 3, 11, and 12. Whether or not he listened to me was a different story. He may have gotten super lucky and beat me that way, or completely threw the game for himself.

Cant Stop/ Incan Gold

This was one of my favorite weeks of class. I’m fascinated by games based off chance and probability and games like Can’t Stop gave me inspiration to construct a game of chance for my final game presentation. I had never played this game before so I was determined to use my knowledge of probability and statistics to give myself a competitive edge over the other players. I ended winning a good majority of the games in fact. I quickly discovered that having the numbers 6,7, and 8 was the most powerful way of advancing up the board, since they are the most common roll combinations when throwing two dice.

This game was actually very simple to run virtually and honestly probably quicker than in person because the game would tell you automatically which lanes you could and couldn’t move up in as opposed to calculating that yourself. This game was fun and everyone in my group enjoyed it. Everyone was laughing and even routing for others when someone would go on a 10+ roll streak. The pace of play was rapid fire and we got multiple games in within our class session which I think is perk to the game. Unfortunately, we could not run Incan Gold over Tabletopia, so my group ended up playing Can’t Stop for the whole session. We had a lot of fun playing this game and I think this is one that I will show to my poker buddies back at home, since they also enjoy games that are probability based.