Cribbage

How to play cribbage

The rules

• Cribbage is a card game for two with a full pack of 52 cards. Aces are low and count one, kings, queens and jacks count ten, and the other cards their face value.
• The score is kept with pegs on a board. Each player has two rows of thirty holes on their side, and pegs up the outer row and back down the inner one. Each player has two pegs: the front one shows the score, the back one the score before. Once round is 61 points, twice round 121.
• Both players cut the pack, and the lower card deals. The other player is the «pone». After that the deal alternates.
• The dealer gives six cards to each. Both players lay two of them face down in the «crib», which belongs to the dealer and is scored after the hands. To make up for the dealer's crib, the pone scores three points on the first deal of a game.
• The pone cuts the pack and the dealer turns up a card: the starter. If it is a jack, the dealer scores «two for his heels».
• Then the play. Starting with the pone, take turns laying one card face up and calling the running total of all the cards laid. You score as you lay: 2 for bringing the total to exactly 15; 2 for a pair with the card before, 6 for three of a kind, a «pair royal», and 12 for four, a «double pair royal»; one point per card for a run of three or more among the last cards laid, in any order; and 2 for exactly 31.
• The total may never go past 31. If you cannot lay without going over, say «go», and your opponent carries on alone as far as they can. When neither of you can lay, whoever laid the last card scores 1 — or just the 2 for 31 if they reached it — and a new count starts from nothing, begun by the other player. When all the cards are out, the last card scores in the same way.
• Then the show. The pone's hand is scored first, then the dealer's, then the crib, which the dealer scores; each counts the starter as a fifth card. Score 2 for every combination of cards adding up to 15; 2 for each pair (6 for three of a kind, 12 for four); one point per card for each run of three or more — a run made more than once with doubled cards counts each time, so a double run of three with its pair is 8, a double run of four 10, a triple run of three 15 and a quadruple run 16; 4 for a flush of four cards in hand (not in the crib), 5 if the starter matches the suit too; and 1 for «his nob», the jack of the starter's suit.
• Points count the moment they are scored, and the first to reach 61, or 121, wins at once — so the pone, who shows first, can win before the dealer has counted.

In this version

• Choose a game to 61 or to 121 under New game. You play the machine only: hands of cards cannot be kept secret between two players on one screen. Every new game starts with a cut for the deal.
• When none of your cards fits under 31, the app says go for you.
• A run with doubled cards is shown as the runs and the pairs separately: a double run of three shows as 6 + 2, the same 8 points.
• Muggins, claiming points your opponent has missed, is not played.
• The machine picks its crib cards by the hand it can expect over every possible starter, and in the play lays the card that scores most there and then.

New game