Do Push Your Luck

The aptly named Can’t Stop is the defining game of the “Push Your Luck” genre. These type of games tend to be typified by one decision: go on, or crash?

The absolute simplest push your luck game I have heard called Pig. You take a 6 sided die. Roll it. If it is a 1-5, you can score that many points. If it is a 6, you crash, you lose any points accumulated previously in this round, and your turn is over. After you roll, assuming you didn’t crash, you can stop and lock in all your points, or roll again to try to get more points but risk crashing.

While it may seem like a pretty straight forward genre, it comes built in with a number of interesting characteristics… and some aspects to watch out for.

There are other good games in the genre. Cloud 9 has a pilot of a hot-air balloon rolling dice, then seeing if he can match the dice roll with cards from his hand. Everyone else in the balloon can stay on, hoping the pilot has it and letting them rise higher to more points. While it does use dice, it introduces a speculative element. Diamant/Incan Gold is a simultaneous play game, where everyone chooses at the same time whether to venture on further into the mine or to head back to camp with the jewels already collected. Can’t Stop, the aforementioned granddaddy, is a race using four dice divided into pairs. The combination with lower probabilities are quicker climbs, and the first person to reach the top of a column locks it out from the other players. After each roll, of course: push on and hope to climb but risk crashing, or play it safe and hope you don’t get overtaken?

Unfortunately, all of these games don’t fit all of my criteria for an “ideal” push your luck game. One day, of course, I will invent this game, and be rich. Until then, here would be my ideal aspects of a push your luck game:

• The more you push your luck in a turn, the riskier it is, but the great the overall payoff instead of having the same percentage decision each time. Each push should be a tough decision.
• The players in the lead have a harder time than the players behind, but being in the lead is safer.
• Little to no downtime, a common problem with push-your-luck
• Interactive with other players- partly because of the previous point, but also for a psychological element
• Speculative but still random element. (No decisions with perfect information either)

If they lack these qualities, then why are these types of games so appealing? Well, they automatically come with tough decisions. Each round is the agonizing “push or don’t.” And from the risk aspect, you get exciting rounds. You get the “groan” moments where everyone at the table groans or cheers depending on how lucky and improbable your rolls are. Most of them have perfectly fine end games, since in most of these games, the person behind can just keep trying and trying to push their luck and still have a shot of winning. And since the games aren’t usually the same kind of interactive as other games, there’s less kingmaker problems.

It’s a great genre, and one with plenty of ideas left to be explored. Play enough of them and you’ll be saying “Can’t Stop!”