Can’t Stop has been one of my go-to gaming nightcaps for several years now, and I don’t expect that to ever change. It’s an impressive design that distills the thrill of gambling into a brief dice game that is simple enough for children, but exciting for all. Even 40 years on from its initial release it is one of, if not the best pure press-your-luck game there is. Although, its longevity isn’t all that surprising when you consider it was designed by the granddaddy of modern board games himself: the legendary Sid Sackson. If you are not aware of this dude’s massive contributions to the art form we all love, I highly encourage you to read up on him and play some of his games. He has some excellent, excellent designs that were waaaaaaay ahead of their time. Perhaps a review of a designer’s game is not the best place to be showering said designer with unreserved adulation, but I can’t help it in this case. Sackson is amazing; I love him. Okay, I’m done. Let’s talk about the game.
Can’t Stop is a dice game played on a board that looks like a stop sign (now that’s good production design!). On this board are 11 columns numbered 2 through 12 that are made up of a number of spaces. The 2 and 12 columns are the shortest with the fewest amount of spaces and the 7 is the tallest with the most. Players are each given a set of 11 playing pieces of a single color, one for each column. Their goal is to be the first to advance their pieces to the top of 3 of the 11 columns. There are an additional 3 white pieces called “Runners” and 4 dice that players will be passing around.
On a player’s turn, they roll the 4 dice and form them into two separate pairs of their choosing. For example, a roll of 2-2-4-5 might be paired off as a 4-9 or 6-7. They then place one of the Runners on the first space of each of the two columns matching these paired numbers. Let’s say they choose 4 & 9. Then, they have another choice: roll again or STOP. It’s early in their turn, so they roll again and pair the dice off into a 4-12. They add the last Runner to the 12 spot and move the runner on the 4 up a space. They now have all three Runners on the board. They are again faced with the same choice: roll again or STOP. This time the decision’s a littler scarier, and I’ll tell you why. All the progress you make on your turn in Can’t Stop is temporary. To make it permanent you must pass to the next player, only then do you replace the Runners in their current positions with your own colored pieces.
But if progress is temporary, then there must be a way to lose it, right? Of course there is. If after any roll of the dice you cannot pair them off in a way that allows you to place or move at least ONE of the Runners, you immediately lose all the progress you’ve made on your turn. ALL OF IT! So our player with Runners on the 4-9-12 columns would be risking a small gain by rolling again, but not nearly as much as if they’d already taken 6 successful dice rolls. Furthermore, every time a player tops out a column all subsequent rolls of that number are invalidated for EVERYONE for the rest of the game. Meaning as the stakes get higher and higher and the players get closer to winning, the danger of rolling unsalvageable bupkes will naturally start to increase. This provides a slight touch of narrative to the experience that is just enough to make the later turns, on the whole, more suspenseful than the early ones. Going for the win late in the game when there’s only a handful of columns still up for grabs and you’ve fallen slightly behind another player that could easily win on their turn creates a now-or-never, do-or-die fiction that is really a ton of fun. This ties perfectly into Can’t Stop‘s core appeal: knowing you stand to lose it all but throwing the dice anyways because you JUST. CAN’T. STOP.
Can’t Stop is in many ways the perfect press-your-luck game, and a large part of its brilliance lies in the possibility that a player can win the entire game in a single turn if they’re willing to play the odds enough. This is the sort of bravura, shouldn’t-work-but-does game design master stroke that only geniuses like Sackson seem to be able to pull off. He has taken the appeal of press-your-luck mechanics to one of their ultimate conclusions, and in a way that sacrifices none of their integrity. I love when people try to win Can’t Stop on their first turn. It’s hilarious. I’ve only seen it actually pulled off a single time, but many a time people have gotten extremely close only to fail all the more spectacularly. Cleverly, this possiblity also works as a natural rubber-banding mechanism if a player is to fall behind. I’ve been privy to some pretty dramatic comebacks in Can’t Stop, and they are always exciting. To be fair, I’ve also seen attempts to catch back up fail repeatedly, causing frustration and disinterest to set in for the affected player. But in a design as open-ended as this, such a thing is inevitable from time to time. Thankfully, Sackson understood this potentiality and made the game mercifully brief to mitigate the issue.
One of the really interesting things about Can’t Stop — and one of the ways it mirrors actual gambling — is that you often find yourself rooting for the dice-roller. It’s very easy to get caught up in the fervor of a player courageously taking chance after chance after chance. Somehow, chanting “Can’t Stop! Can’t Stop! Can’t Stop!” at the active player as they decide whether or not to continue rolling seems to never get old (and when they start to get annoyed it makes it even funnier). Also, prepare yourself for millions bad jokes with the title of the game as the punch-line (“If only there was some way for you to stop, but you CAN’T!”). You could definitely slot this alongside No Thanks! into a certain category of games whose titles seem to force their players beyond the limits of their personal willpower to refrain from making corny quips based on them.
Can’t Stop is a single good idea taken to its maximum potential, which is many times all a game needs to be. It is the rare game fueled almost entirely by RNG that understands exactly what people find appealing about RNG in the first place: the thrill of the gamble. Undiluted. No fluff, no auxiliary systems that get in the way. Sid Sackson is a master at this approach. His best designs are laser-focused and deliver a remarkably exact experience. The result is that, despite its age, Can’t Stop‘s faults are few. It’s slightly unintuitive, its core concepts may not reach out immediately to new players, and every now and then the dice just won’t behave for you while behaving way too well for someone else. But for a game this smart, quick, and enjoyable, these issues are negligible. A single lengthy run of odds-defying rolls will make anyone a believer, and Can’t Stop might be the only game around where all it takes to win is to believe.
Can’t Stop gets a rating of FOUR out of FIVE, indicating it is RECOMMENDED.