Mountain Goats

I had two copies of Can’t Stop, in case I lost one. So naturally I lost both.

This was discovered a few months ago when my children wanted to play with me.

At this year’s Gathering my wife declared that Mountain Goats was “pretty close.” So we ordered a copy.

Of course, there has now been a reprint of Can’t Stop. In order to avoid temping fate, I bought only one.

And I have now played Mountain Goats as well.

I agree that despite the differences (Mountain Goats is not a push your luck game. You get one roll a turn) it kind-of-captures some of Can’t Stop’s feel. You roll four dice and can group them (however you want). There are only columns 5-10, though.¹ Each time you claim a number your goat in that column goes up one step (columns have 2-4 steps). If you get to the top step you knock the current goat back to the bottom and claim a point token (equal to column #). If you are already at the top you get a token and stay. The first person to get a token in each column gets a bonus, which decreases for the next person. Play until all bonus tokens are claimed, or three columns have no points left, and highest score wins².

So — no push your luck but you have this jockeying in columns. Sometimes you want to grab a column and hope to hit it multiple times, sometimes there is a bottleneck right before the top because the first goat up will undoubtedly be knocked down fast, but the last goat there may have several turns. (Goats naturally share spaces, since they do not seem to be bothered by most laws of nature, ie gravity).

Can’t Stop is an all time classic, but Mountain Goats is fine. It’s a reasonable back up plan. Kind of like a second copy of Can’t Stop, but with different rules.

Rating — Indifferent-plus.

1. (if you roll multiple ‘1s’ you can set all but one of those die to any number(s) you want). ︎
2. Technically you finish the round ︎