OK, so Sena and I have been experimenting with a few cribbage variants in the last few days and I ran into this Calvinball comment on a Reddit cribbage thread about 10-card cribbage. Yes, people play that! I’m afraid to look on the web for 11-card cribbage although Sena asked about it.
Briefly, 10-card cribbage is usually a two-player game. Deal 10 cards each; 2 cards from each player go to the dealer’s crib; each player divides the remaining 8 cards into 2 four card hands, one for pegging and either one or both for the show.
As an aside, the Reddit thread person who started the thread about 10 card cribbage asked if anyone else ever played it. One commenter facetiously replied “Yes, there have been many many posts of Calvinball crib.”
You have to know where that term “Calvinball” comes from. I’m pretty sure it’s from another social media forum which plays a game called Calvinball—which is a whimsical, forever evolving game which has nothing to do with playing cards, is based on the comic Calvin & Hobbes and has no real rules whatsoever. Participants make it up as they go along. So, I think what the commenter might have meant was that 10-card cribbage is yet another of the many proliferating variants (some better than others) of the more well-established game, usually identified as 6-card cribbage.
Anyway, we found out later that there are two sets of rules for 10-card cribbage. The intent is to make the game play faster and yield higher scores.
Given that context, we played it both ways to 121. In the one set according to AI, you deal each player 10 cards and both throw 2 cards to the dealer’s crib. Each player divides the remaining cards into hands of 4 cards each. You play one hand only during the pegging phase and the other for the show (scoring the hand). It was pretty slow and didn’t yield high scores, partly because we used only the four card hand for the show.
And then there’s a Wikipedia article which says you peg with one hand and score both for the show. We got higher scores all around, the game was faster, and we both enjoyed it much more.
As a reminder follow up to the post about the 9-card and 8-card cribbage games, Sena still likes the 9-card variant but doesn’t care for the 8-card (neither do I) because it seems clunkier, probably because you need to bury cards under the deck. The 9-card variant has an on-line scorer which didn’t work consistently. We seemed to fare pretty well without it for the most part. The suggestion to play to 323 (up, back, and there again on a 121-hole board) seems like overkill. I’m retired but not that retired.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 