It felt like a coin operated slots game in Atlantic City. I’m going to be generous and give it a 3 out of 5 for the nostalgia factor, the excellent attempt at interface envoking the board game, and the general 70s schmaltziness of the game experience. 99 retail, I hope Playdek takes this game seriously enough to fix them, it’s a classic. Suffice to say, there’s more than one bug and this app needs some work to be 100% perfect. I don’t want to beat them up over each and every bug that I discovered during play. Hey, look! I have five active columns at once! or is that six? This has been discussed at length on Boardgamegeek. The game (on the screen) isn’t following the rules of Can’t Stop, with several bugs noticeable– the game won’t allow you to claim combinations that you rolled, puts extra colored tokens on the board, etc. After several games, I noticed a few glitches. I’d like to be able to turn this stuff off, but I don’t see how. Perhaps Playdek has no faith in the excitement level of a basic dice game, and felt that it needed some artificial excitement. This is just the tip of the animation iceburg I was besieged by a plethora of “You WIN!” “Hot STREAK!” and “ROCK AND ROLLER!” animations, which are cute once or twice but kind of get old after a little while. So did they knock this one out of the park, or not? Playdek is one of the best boardgame conversion app companies in existence. This is sort of a given from a group like Playdek, who have a great track record behind them with Ascension, Nightfall, Summoner Wars and Food Fight. In general, the game interface captures much of the board game Can’t Stop’s look and feel perfectly. But the more that the player risks rolling the dice during a turn, the greater the risk of losing the advances made during that turn by “crapping out” or not rolling the combination you already have selected. The goal of the game is to “claim” (get to the top of) three of the columns before any of the other players can. 6,7,8 being the most common (and the most squares to go up) and 12 and 2 being the least common rolls and with only a few spaces.
The number of spaces in each column roughly corresponds to the likelihood of rolling them on two dice. The board consists of eleven columns of spaces, one column for each of the numbers 2 through 12. The app’s interface follows the original boardgame (by Parker Brothers, released in the 60s) faithfully: Four dice, a board in the shape of a stop sign, a set of eleven markers for each player, and three neutral-colored markers to show your current dice roll columns. It’s a simple dice game with a simple premise. CAN’T STOP is one of the games that made Sid famous (in certain circles). So, yes, you might say I was happy to see one of Sid’s most famous games show up in App form recently. He was also a great guy who is sadly missed (Sid passed away in 2002). He wrote about game design and his books are considered essential reading. He designed ACQUIRE, EXECUTIVE DECISION, BAZAAR and a bunch of other games.
Sid Sackson probably forgot more about game design during the course of his life than many active designers today will ever learn. Unless you’re a geek savant, you’re probably not having the name Sid Sackson ring any bells for you. Play: hotseat and versus AI, no network play There’s been some very interesting releases in the last few months, and since BGG doesn’t send me anything to review any more I’d thought I’d start catching up on this blog again.
SPECTROMANCER WIKI FREE
I’ve been meaning to write a few reviews for dog’s years now, but haven’t had a lot of free time until lately. CAN’T STOP, SLAP SHOT, ALIEN FRONTIERS and SPECTROMANCER