Cribbage

Also known as Crib, Six-card Cribbage

Players

2-4 players (best with 2)

Deck

1 standard deck (52 cards), plus a cribbage board or pencil and paper

Time

20-45 minutes

Difficulty

Medium

Category

Matching & collecting

Setup

Two players, one standard 52-card deck, and a cribbage board with two pegs each. Cards rank king high down to ace low, and for counting purposes an ace is 1, a face card is 10, and everything else is worth its index. The ace is always low and runs never turn the corner: ace-two-three is a run, queen-king-ace is not.

Cut for the deal: low card deals first, and the deal alternates every hand afterwards. Cutting for the first deal matters, because the dealer's edge is real and it swaps every deal.

Deal six cards to each player, one at a time, and put the rest of the deck face down to one side. Look at your six and lay two of them face down in a pile off to the dealer's side of the board. Those four cards are the crib, an extra hand that the dealer alone will score at the end of the deal, so the non-dealer throws to it defensively and the dealer throws to it generously. Neither player looks at the crib until the hands have been played out.

Once both hands are down to four cards and the crib is out of the way, the non-dealer makes a cut; the dealer lifts the upper half clear, takes whichever card the cut has exposed underneath, and sets it face up on the reassembled deck. This is the starter, and it is shared: both hands and the crib count it as a fifth card at the end of the deal. It sits out the pegging entirely. A jack turned as the starter is worth 2 to the dealer there and then, called two for his heels; strict play wants it claimed before the opening lead, and a dealer who forgets forfeits it.

Both pegs start off the board. Score by leapfrogging the back peg ahead of the front one, so the gap always shows what you just scored.

Play

A deal has two phases: the play, usually called pegging, and then the show.

The play. The non-dealer leads a card face up in front of them and announces its value. The dealer plays a card and announces the new running total, and so on alternately, each of you keeping your own played cards in a personal row rather than a shared pile so the hands can be picked up again afterwards. The running total may never exceed 31.

You peg immediately as you lay a card down: 2 for taking the total to exactly 15; 2 for taking it to exactly 31; 2 for matching the rank just laid; 6 if you make it three of that rank; 12 for a fourth. A run of three or more scores a point per card, counting backwards through the cards played since the last reset, in any order, as long as no unrelated card sits among them and no rank is repeated. A duplicate kills the run: once 2, 3, 4 has pegged three, a second 3 played on top scores nothing at all, because the four cards contain two 3s and the last three played are not a run either. Runs can be lengthened by either player: after 6, 4, 5 has scored three, a 3 or a 7 scores four. Suits are irrelevant during the play, and a pair is only a pair if the card just before it matched, not merely if the rank appeared earlier.

Go. You must play whenever you legally can; passing by choice is not allowed. If every card left in your hand would push the total past 31, say "go". Your opponent then keeps playing on their own for as long as they legally can. Once the count is stuck and no legal card can follow, a single point goes to the player who put down that final card, or 2 where the count happens to have stopped dead on 31. The count then resets to zero and the player who did not lay that last card leads to the new count, with whatever cards remain. This is the same point people call "last card": when both hands run dry, the player who laid the final card of the deal takes that single point, or 2 if it happened to make 31. It is one point, not a go point plus a last-card point.

The show. When both hands are empty, everyone picks their four cards back up and scores them together with the starter, treating it as a fifth card. Counting happens in a fixed order and must be done aloud: the non-dealer's hand first, then the dealer's hand, then the dealer's crib. That order decides close games, because play stops the moment a peg reaches the game hole. A non-dealer sitting on 118 counts first and can win before the dealer's hand and crib are ever counted.

The deal then passes to the other player, all fifty-two cards are gathered up and shuffled, and the next hand begins. Points are pegged as they are earned, never totalled at the end, and a peg once advanced cannot be moved back; if you overlook points and start the next stage, they are lost, unless you are playing muggins, in which case your opponent takes them.

Goal & scoring

First to 121 points wins, which is twice around a standard board plus the game hole. Points are pegged continuously, and the game ends instantly when a peg reaches 121, mid-count if necessary.

A hand or crib is scored as those four cards plus the starter, and every scoring combination that can be made from those five counts, including the same card used again and again in different combinations:

• Fifteen: any group of cards adding to exactly 15 scores 2, and you count every distinct group.
• Pair: 2 per pair. Three of a kind is three separate pairs and so scores 6; four of a kind scores 12.
• Run: 3 or more in consecutive rank scores 1 per card, and each distinct run counts. A double run of three (a run plus a duplicated rank) scores 8 in all, since it is two runs of three plus a pair.
• Flush: 4 if all four cards in hand share a suit, 5 if the starter matches too. In the crib only the full five-card flush scores; four matching crib cards on their own are worth nothing.
• His nobs: 1 for holding the jack of the starter's suit, in hand or in the crib.
• His heels: 2 to the dealer, pegged at once, when the starter turned is a jack.

The highest possible hand is 29: three fives and the jack matching a starter five. Zero-point hands are common enough to have their own name, a nineteen.

In match play, a loser still short of 91 is skunked and the win is usually worth double; short of 61 is a double skunk.

Variants

Five-card cribbage — The original English form. Five cards are dealt to each player, both discard two, and hands of only three are played, so pegging is short and the crib carries a lot of the scoring. Game is 61, once around the board, and the non-dealer pegs 3 straight away at the start of the game as compensation for not having the first crib.

Three-handed cribbage — Each player is dealt five cards and discards one to the crib. Because that leaves the crib a card short, the dealer also deals one card face down to it straight off the deck. Everyone plays alone on a triangular board, the deal rotates left, and the player to the dealer's left leads the first card and counts first at the show.

Partnership cribbage — The standard four-player game: two teams of two, partners facing each other, one peg line per team. Deal five cards each and everyone discards one to the dealer's crib. Play proceeds clockwise around the table, and either partner's points advance the shared peg. First side to 121 wins.

Muggins — An optional rule that punishes sloppy counting. If you finish counting a hand or crib and have missed points, your opponent may call "muggins" and peg those points instead. It is common in club and tournament play and worth agreeing on before the first deal rather than after somebody undercounts.

• classic
• counting
• family-friendly
• strategy
• travel
• two-player

Rules checked against Pagat, Bicycle Cards, Wikipedia, Britannica, American Cribbage Congress, Masters of Games.