Can’t Stop Express as a game and as a historical artifact

I have been revisiting Can’t Stop Express, a game that I actually started playing before I had any idea who Sid Sackson was. 

My introduction to it was through BrettspielWelt, where you could open up a smaller window to play it (or Black Box) as a solitaire fidget. Sometimes, around the same time, one of my friends and I would play it on scrap paper while waiting for D&D games to start.

I find that I approach Can’t Stop Express from two directions: as a historical artifact and as a game.

Of the two, the historical one is more interesting for me. Sackson published the rules as Solitaire Dice in his book Gamut of Games in 1969. In it, he wrote that he wanted to create a dice game that wasn’t about gambling.

Since then, it was formally published as Choice, Einstein and Extra before Can’t Stop Express seems to have stuck. It’s never gone away but it doesn’t have the punch of the younger Can’t Stop. Which, to be fair, is an amazing game.

Mechanically, Can’t Stop Express is simple. Roll five dice. Pair up four of them and also mark down the fifth die. There aren’t any rerolls or any other dice manipulation. Your control and choices comes from the number of dice.

A few thoughts:

The fact that if you start a number, it’s negative two hundred points until you get a fifth check mark, adds a lot of stakes to your choices. And that fifth mark just zeroes it out. Getting just a positive score requires luck and good choices.

The reject numbers function as an automaton opponent before that was even a thing. In fact, your unused rolls working against you might be the biggest legacy of Can’t Stop Express. It’s a mechanic I’ve seen in many games and it’s the earliest example I’ve seen. The game might not have had the biggest mass appeal but A Gamut of Games is a book that game designers read.

I knew that the game is now a multi-player solitaire with everyone using the same die rolls. However, when I went back to look at the rules in A Gamut of Games, I found that it also listed that for competitive play. Fourteen years before Take It Easy. I had no idea there was an example that old! Heck, I think my friends and I just took turns, back in the day.

These days, there are Roll and Writes I would pick before Can’t Stop Express. It is dry and it’s actually quite difficult to do well. However, virtually all those games are post-Qwixx. For over forty years, Can’t Stop Express was one of the best Roll and Writes I can think of. It blows Yahtzee or Kismet or the justifiably obscure 6 Steps out of the water.

From a contemporary standpoint, Can’t Stop Express is decent. From a historical perspective, it keeps impressing me.