Variations on cribbage rules
Cribbage rules have remained largely unchanged since the game first originated in the 17th century, but there are many variations on the standard rules of cribbage and many different forms and variants of the game. Captain's Cribbage is perhaps the best known, and most widely played.
Cribbage rules
Variations on cribbage scoring
Cribbage scoring can count against you instead of for you, as in Lowball cribbage.
Number of players
The number of players can include one, for solitaire cribbage, two, as in the normal cribbage rules; three, in three-player cribbage and Captain's cribbage, or four, in four-player cribbage.
Number of cards
The number of cards in a cribbage hand can vary from five, in five-Card cribbage, to seven, in seven-card cribbage.
See the Captain's Cribbage page for more details.
Everything you know is wrong! In Lowball cribbage the aim is to score as low as possible, and the first to 121 is the loser. The winner scores a skunk if he has not yet reached 91 when his opponent pegs out. The play is turned on its head and zero-point hands suddenly become desirable. Playing Lowball will keep your skills and concentration sharp; it is easy to forget that one is trying not to peg points. The play requires you to rewrite your book of tactics - now you are trying to force your opponent into making scores, and avoid them yourself.
Lowball cribbage links
If you want to know more about lowball cribbage, visit the Lowball Cribbage web site.
Unlike most good two-player games, the rules of cribbage also work well with three players. The deal is five cards to each player and one to the crib. Each player discards one. You can remember this with the phrase "Five and one, throw one" (five cards each and one to the crib, discard one). Otherwise play is as usual; you can use a special three-track cribbage board, or two can use a normal cribbage board and one player can tally his score on a piece of paper.
The play is an intriguing blend of the standard cribbage rules and lowball Cribbage, as a play which would normally set you up to make a score may hand the points to the player at your right. If one player says 'Go' the player to his left may play, if he can, make 31, if he can, or say 'Go' himself. After two 'Go's the player who last laid a card scores the go and the player to his left leads.
Though the normal three-handed game is fun to play, the superior variant for three players is Captain's Cribbage'.
Four-player cribbage is much the same as the standard game except that the deal is five cards to each player, who discards one to the crib. You can remember this with the phrase "Five, throw one". Each partners the player opposite and game is 121 points the partnership.
Yet another thought-provoking twist to the play as one must now try to set up scores for ones partner, but without knowing what cards he holds. As with three-player cribbage, the 'Go' may pass around until it reaches the last person to play, and he scores it.
Five-card cribbage is played according to the usual cribbage rules, with the following differences:
- After the cut, pone pegs three (on the first hand only). This is to counterbalance the fact that the crib is larger than either hand.
- The deal is five cards each, of which two are discarded to the crib. You can remember this with the phrase "Five, throw two".
- When the count reaches 31 or 'go', the play is over and the players score their hands, instead of starting a new count.
- Game is 61 points.
The five-card game is initially not as attractive as six-card cribbage, because the hands tend to score less. However the larger crib, short game and the single count to 31 add interesting wrinkles to the play. Five-card cribbage is a good starting point for beginners as the game is fast and the counting is usually easier.
American five-card cribbage
In this variant the deal is five cards to each player and two to the crib. Each player discards one card. Otherwise the play is as for the standard game.
7 card cribbage rules are just like the standard rules, with a few simple exceptions.
The deal is seven cards to each player and one to the crib. Each player discards two. You can remember this with the phrase "Seven and one, throw two". Game is 151 points.
In speedo cribbage, after pone has made his discard, the dealer may pick up those two cards, add them to his hand, and then discard the four cards of his choice to his own crib. In other words, pone passes the dealer two cards, who then discards any four from a hand of eight.
However, this only holds true as long as the dealer has not passed the skunk line. After this, he may not look at the crib at all and the game proceeds as normal.
What is Five Hundred Cribbage?
I am indebted to Mr Herb Barge who sent me scans of a book written by a distant relative of his in the 30s, Thomas B. Stauff. This book, entitled "Rules of Play governing '500' Cribbage, Thomas system, a Modern Version of Cribbage", appears to be a fairly radical re-working of the game.
As it seems not to have caught on with card players, and is therefore primarily of historical interest, I will not give the complete rules of Five Hundred Cribbage here. A summary of the main differences follows.
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Go is 34. Mr Stauff bases this choice on its number-theoretical relationship with 15, and invokes no less an authority than Euclid to back him up. However, you could probably find justifications for choosing almost any number, and 34 seems not sufficiently a more obvious number than 31. Neither does it make the pegging play dramatically different or more logical, which rather leads one to suspect that things not broken are better not mended.
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Mr Stauff, clearly a keen poker player, was apparently much exercised about the relative point values of the straight flush (10) and four-of-a-kind, known as pair royal (12). He points out, accurately, that the straight flush is a more unlikely poker hand than four-of-a-kind and so ranks higher in poker scoring. Thus he makes a special award for the 5-card straight flush (but, not, interestingly, the 4-card variety) of 5 points, bringing the total to 15.
His justification for this particular choice is that in a pair royal each card is 'worth' 3 points of the total 12. Therefore each card in a 5-card straight flush should also be 'worth' 3 points, making 15. Which perhaps goes to show that his grasp of card playing exceeded his grasp of combinatorics and probability theory, but his very American reforming zeal endears him to us nonetheless.
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Though 5-card straight flushes probably don't come up that often, rendering the whole debate rather negligible, the 5-point bonus does mean that a 19 hand becomes attainable (and thereby, no doubt, infuriates traditionalists everywhere). For example the 3-4-5-6-7 flush contains a 15-4 in addition to the Stauff 15, making a resounding 19. I can see this causing scoring confusion, though. Perhaps this score should be announced as "I really have nineteen. No, honestly."
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Mr Stauff argues that traditional Cribbage scoring does not give adequate recognition to the three different ways to score points: pegging, hand and crib. Accordingly, he proposes (as far as I can determine, for the description is not exhaustive) a six-track board where each player can record separately the points gained in each class.
The scores in each class are then given a different weighting and summed to count towards Game (500). Pegging points are the most valuable, which seems reasonable, followed by one's own hand and finally the crib (which some might say should be the highest-weighted, since half the cards were placed in it by your opponent specifically to stop you scoring). I suspect that this change, being by far the most radical of Mr Stauff's proposed modifications, and involving as it does not only the purchase of special equipment but a good deal of mental arithmetic for scoring every hand, may have been the one which broke the camel's back as far as the Cribbage community at large was concerned.
Nonetheless I would be most interested to hear from anyone who has played, or even heard of '500' Cribbage, or its seemingly forgotten originator. Do any of Mr Stauff's special boards still exist (assuming they were ever made)? Or perhaps your ancestor devised a version of Cribbage where you have to make 17 instead of 15, and you score an extra 50 points on hands containing the nine-and-a-half of diamonds. Email and let me know.
Joseph Kane sells a special Cribbage board, with conventional tracks on one side and a special figure-8 design on the other for playing a game of his own invention called 'Crash Cribbage'. Both players' pegs share a single track, and if your peg collides with one of your opponent's it modifies his score. See Joseph's site for further details:
Kings Cribbage
Kings Cribbage is not strictly speaking a variant of cribbage, but a new game based on a combination of cribbage and Scrabble. See our Kings Cribbage page for more details.
Cribbage Squares
To play this cribbage solitaire game, you deal out cards from a shuffled pack one at a time, placing them into a 4x4 grid. Your aim is to make the maximum score from each of the rows and columns. Once you have dealt out the 16 cards, turn one further card up as the starter. Each row and column in the grid is scored as a cribbage hand, using the normal cribbage scoring rules. To 'win' you need to score more than 61 points for all the hands combined.
A more interesting variation on standard Cribbage Squares is to use one or two 'reserves': if you are not sure where to place the current card, you can add it face-up to a reserve pile. The top card from each reserve pile may be played at any time.