Remember that cribbage game Sena and I filmed a while ago to show we could finish a cribbage game in 15 minutes if we really tried? Well, we just managed, although truth to tell, our games typically run 20 minutes or so.
Well, today I looked at the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) monthly newsletter called Cribbage World. There’s an interesting article in the My Deal column (a regular feature) on page 6 in which the writer, David Aiken (one of the board directors) describes how the ACC manages slow players in tournaments.
They actually move up the starting line to either 28 or 56. Apparently, the problem of slow cribbage players is common enough to make a rule change that makes the typical cribbage hole range shorter than 121. It’s called playing the short game.
The way they standardized this was to use cribbage expert DeLynn Colvert’s 26 Theory as described in his book “Play Winning Cribbage.” This forms the basis of what is sometimes called positional cribbage. Sena and I contacted the person at the ACC who typically answers questions about cribbage about how commonly do tournament players use positional cribbage strategy to increase their chances of winning by playing aggressively or defensively depending on board position and knowing where the “par holes” are located.
Incredibly, he says he doesn’t use it, yet he’s reached Grand Master level over the course of his career. I never use it either, but it’s because I don’t understand it well enough.
Anyway, they adjusted the par holes based on Colvert’s 26 Theory and came up with new starting holes that would compensate for the tendency for some players to play too slowly during tournaments.
Of course, that raises the question of how do tournament officials know which players need to play the short game? Do the slow players self-select? I hardly think so; many would probably resist being labeled “slow.” Would they have to play rock, paper, scissors with tournament organizers to settle it?
I don’t know how that’s done. Occasionally, I take a stab at trying to read Colvert’s chapter on his 26 Theory. Inevitably, I give up before getting to the “ah hah, Eureka!” moment. I did find a couple of other articles by Aiken about the 26 Theory which were published in the January page 6 and February page 6 2023 issues of Cribbage World. I think it’s fascinating that somebody else came up with a strategy similar to Colvert’s about a hundred years before he did.
I read this article today about how more and more students are using ChatGPT or some kind of AI to write term papers. The title gives you a clue what the author’s opinion of it: “AI Chatbots could be making you stupider.”
For about the last 3 years I’ve been writing about how AI is not the greatest thing, in fact both Sena and I say it should be “dislodged.” It won’t be, so we need to keep our brains limber. Hey, we exercise our bodies. There are ways to exercise our brains and some of them can be fun.
For example, we regularly play cribbage and there are variations of the game that make scoring more challenging.
Sena regularly says that 6 card cribbage as typically played in tournaments sponsored by the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) is too easy those who participate in them. I think that might be an overstatement, but there’s no doubt a lot of variants make you think harder about scoring, what cards to throw to the crib, and how to think your way through the pegging phase.
Take 9 card cribbage for example—please! I almost hate this game because the hand and crib scores are often too hard to count. You have to resort to using a computer scorer that, so far, you can find in only one place and it’s the Reddit site where you also can find the rules of the game. It’s not hard to play because you follow the basic rules of 6 card cribbage. It’s just mind-bendingly difficult to score most of the time.
You can check out our YouTube video of 9 card cribbage for the Cribbage Wars game if you like, which took hours (no, days) to put together because of the scoring complexity.
I still can’t get over the fact that Sena got a 29-hand playing 6 card cribbage on Cribbage Wars a while back and we never even recognized it until days later. The context of playing 6 card cribbage on a Cribbage Wars game board somehow made us oblivious to seeing the 29-hand right in front of us. Most people never see it because the odds of getting it are 1 in 216,580.
I realize playing cribbage isn’t the same as writing term papers, but it’s still good for your brain. Some think people are still better than AI at playing cribbage.
There is a computer player called Brutal on a computer version of cribbage called Cribbage Pro. I got a 28-hand playing Brutal once. Google Gemini calls this an AI player and says, while Brutal uses algorithms and statistics, it can falter when facing the psychological tactics used by humans.
Google Gemini summary and a video of a Cribbage Pro game using ChatGPT:
“AI Performance: High-level AI, such as that in the CribbagePro app, is very competitive, with top human players only beating the hardest bot 55% to 60% of the time.
Techniques Used: AI in cribbage uses a combination of techniques, including reinforcement learning and minimax algorithms, focusing on maximizing scores in both the discarding and pegging phases.
Challenges: While analyzing the best cards to discard is a “static” problem, teaching an AI to excel at the “pegging” (card play) phase is harder, as it requires anticipating opponents’ moves.
Vision Technology: Recent developments include using AI for real-time computer vision, such as apps that use machine learning to identify and score physical cards on a table.
While AI is capable of playing, it often focuses on statistical optimization rather than the psychological aspects of the game used by human players.”
We’ve got a YouTube video of our 9 card cribbage wars game yesterday. I think it took at least half a dozen tries because the counts were so high. We used the skunked.club computer scorer, but it still took 70 minutes to finish the game.
The skunked.club scorer helped a lot but it doesn’t work if you need to count complicated runs containing any 10 cards. It’s OK with face cards, but it doesn’t handle ones and zeros in counting runs. It also doesn’t take suits into account so it won’t count the nob jacks or flushes. You’re on your own for those.
I just recorded the highlights because it took so much time to play and count the hand and crib scores.
We switched out 3 batteries for the camera to keep filming progress going although we also reviewed the clips in between. It was an all-day thing!
I don’t know if anyone else has ever tried to record a mashup game of 9 card cribbage and cribbage wars. What did I learn from it?
Hey, this is an announcement of our forthcoming marathon 9 card cribbage wars mashup YouTube video. We played 9 card cribbage on our Cribbage Wars board. We made liberal use of the skunked.club computer scoring program, which is why I had the laptop computer on the table.
We had a fun, albeit at times confusing adventure on this experiment, which I don’t know if anyone’s ever attempted before. Give us a shout-out if you have!
Hey, we played our first game on our brand-new jumbo cribbage board from Michaud Toys in Canada! It looks great! The numbers are easy to see and it seems easier to peg on.
We also got two new batteries for our Nikon camera and it supports recording an entire game which keeps us from fretting over how much time we play while filming.
You might notice we used what we call a “short cut” in counting runs when scoring hands. See this nifty article on how to do that!
Well, by some miracle we got through a Cribbage Rumble game yesterday and we recorded the whole 75-minute event for posterity. We reviewed it several times and it looked pretty good this morning although we were so delirious by the time we finished the marathon, there might be a few bloopers. I also reviewed our house rules and the updated version is below.
This took much longer to play than our first two cribbage wars games we played on the Ebonwood board and which are on my YouTube channel (@JamesAmosMD). We finished those in an hour. This one took 75 minutes.
One question that arose was what does a player in the Blue Time Trap do if his opponent lands in the Blue Penalty Box? I think AI was the only one who explicitly states what happens and it’s below:
According to AI which is the only source for guidance. Although it gives the Crib Wars rules as a reference, I couldn’t find it in the actual pdf source on the web. Anyway, what AI says happens if your opponent lands in the Blue Penalty Box while you’re in the Blue Time Trap:
“Yes, if you are in a blue time trap, you can absolutely use the 20-point forward movement gained from your opponent landing in a blue penalty zone to move forward and potentially exit the trap faster. The rules state that the opponent of the player landing in the penalty box moves 20 holes forward, which takes precedence over your current trapped status.
Key Rules for this Scenario:
Opponent Penalty: In a two-player game, when your opponent lands in a blue penalty box, you, as the opponent, advance 20 holes.
Time Trap Escape: When in a blue time trap, you must follow the blue path. Advancing 20 holes via your opponent’s penalty helps you reach the end of that blue path faster.
Interaction: The forward movement from the penalty is added to your current position, allowing you to move through or past the time trap’s designated path.”
Note: According to Ebonwood rules, an award of 20 points cannot place a player into a new penalty box or time trap; if it would, you skip to the first hole beyond it.
But since neither one of us ever hit the penalty box, that scenario never happened.
A few words about our new Cribbage Rumble game are in order. First of all, the handsome Cribbage Rumble board is made by Michaud Toys in Ontario, Canada. It’s a slimmer design than our handsome Ebonwood cribbage board, but the basic zones are the same. It’s interesting that Michaud originally called the game Cribbage Wars about a year ago and later changed the name to Cribbage Rumble. On the other hand, when we got the board, it came with a special card with a set of rules for “Cribbage Wars.” The Ebonwood board (made in Wisconsin) cost $210 when we bought it in 2025. The Michaud Toys board cost about $90.
Interesting historical notes: Crib Wars was first invented by a couple of guys from Ontario, Canada. Norm Ackland and Robert J. Prettie patented Crib Wars in 2000. Norm was also an Elvis Tribute Artist (ETA). The terminology for the name of the game is a little confusing. Ackland and Prettie made the first Crib Wars game. There’s also Cribbage Wars, marketed by Ebonwood. They are the same game with the same rules. Cribbage Rumble is also the same game as the first two.
Our updated House Rules for Cribbage Rumble (same as Crib Wars and Cribbage Wars):
There’s no Muggers Alley on either the Ebonwood board or the Michaud Toys board and we never play muggins. Below are my updated descriptions of the colored zones, which we discuss and demonstrate during the video.
Red Skips: There are 3 of these. The rule says if you land on the first red box you should slide to the next red box which gets you 20 holes further along the board. The red box just means the set of 3 holes highlighted with a red color. You get from the first one to the next one by just moving the peg 20 holes. You’ll land in the 2nd set of holes marked in red. This is a boon in the first Red Skip area. However, if you pay attention to the directional arrows in the path guiding you, it looks like they accelerate you toward two of the Blue Time Traps.
Blue Time Traps: There are 4 of these and there will be three blue lines, meaning the blue color covers all three holes and all three peg tracks (3 holes along the track and 3 holes across the track). If you land in a set of three holes highlighted in blue, you end up moving to a blue area of holes that actually set you behind several holes. You have to play your way out of them. Players note that you can end up in repetitious cycling back to the traps largely because of how often you can get one or two points at a time while scoring. In fact, some say that if their opponent gets close to a Blue Time Trap they may purposely lead with a five card (something you would rarely if ever do in a standard cribbage game). That could trap the opponent into playing a ten card or a 5 card, which might risk them moving only a couple of holes right back into the Blue Time Trap. The same thing could happen with falling into the Blue Penalty Boxes. If you land in a Blue Time Trap and your opponent lands in a Blue Penalty Box, you can get out of the trap by moving forward 20 holes, which gets you out of the trap faster.
Blue Penalty Boxes: There are three of them. You fall into one of these by moving your peg into one of the single blue hole lines, meaning one blue track across the three peg tracks. This is a disaster because you immediately have to move back 20 holes and fold your hand and your crib while your opponent moves forward 20 holes, finishes pegging and counts their hand and crib (if they have the crib). Asking AI is the only way I could find out how to learn how to peg moving back and forward 20 holes. The player who lands in the penalty box moves their front peg back 20 holes starting from the penalty box. You don’t move the rear peg. If your front peg lands behind the rear peg, it becomes the new rear peg. The player who doesn’t land in the penalty box moves their front peg forward 20 holes. The player who lands in the penalty box immediately folds their hand and crib.
Green Advances: There are two of them. If you land in a green hole, you take short cut path. The long one saves you from moving toward the Blue Time Trap in the left lower quadrant. You don’t avoid the potential other trap above. If you take the normal track instead you end up moving toward the lower left quadrant Blue Time Trap—but you have a chance at getting into the short Green Advance track before you get there which loops back away from it and you end up going in the direction of the upper Blue Time Trap.
You think you’re in the clear after that? You’re not because there is a sadistically placed Blue Penalty Box in the next to the last hole before the Finish Line!
We’ve been working on the video for our marathon Cribbage Rumble game on our new Cribbage Rumble board. I plan to make the YouTube recording tomorrow! It made our heads spin!
Invisible to us anyway. We’ve been excited about filming our first Cribbage Rumble game and we thought the first video we got on March 25, 2026 was too disorganized and chaotic to accept.
It’s a good thing I didn’t discard the clips—because Sena got a 29 hand. The trouble was we both failed to notice it! We have video evidence of the whole thing. It’s funny and spooky to watch.
OK, it’s time to start making excuses for why we didn’t see the 29 hand. We were playing Cribbage Rumble on our new board from Michaud Toys, so we were focused on the many zones and traps rather than thinking about anything so rare as the 29 hand showing up.
There’s no reason not to expect that a 29 score could happen in a 6-card cribbage game, but our focus was not on that. It was on avoiding things like Blue Time Traps and Blue Penalty Boxes.
Despite our focus on trying to score Sena’s hand, I think we failed to notice the obvious because the context was on Cribbage Rumble, not the rare 29 hand, the odds of which are 1 in 216,580 against getting.
I think that’s why our attention was on the four 5 cards and trying to count the 15s for 2 (which make 8 points) and the other 15s for 2 with the Jack (which is also 8 points). I knew that the four 5s is 4 of a kind which makes 12. In fact, when I said near the end of the video that I remembered seeing something “maybe once before in my life,” all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind. That would have got us to 28 but we didn’t process that. We could see only parts of the elephant.
I think the other reason we didn’t react to it was that we’d played Cribbage Rumble all afternoon and into the early evening. We were tired.
It wasn’t until the next day that I used the skunkeddotclub scorer (just out of curiosity) to see what the total score was. It was 28. Then I added the 1 point because of the nob Jack (same suit as the club 5 card) and came up with 29. The scorer doesn’t deal with suits.
It still didn’t click. I told Sena that her hand’s total score was 29, in a totally offhand way. She didn’t really react to it, either.
Early this morning right after I first woke up, I began to wonder whether the score was an “alternate” way to score the famous and elusive 29 hand in 6 card cribbage. Over a few minutes, it finally dawned on me that thinking of it as “alternate” didn’t make any sense. It just was the 29 hand.
That’s when I got excited and told Sena about it. I said something confusing at the end of the video when I said something about seeing the hand “maybe once before in my life” but all I meant was that I’d seen 4 of a kind (scores 12 points). I still didn’t see that 29 hand at the time.
We finished the first Cribbage Rumble game on our new board today! Remember, yesterday the game was very long and I think the memory card pooped out at a crucial moment. So, today I went out and bought a new memory card with more space on it and we started from scratch making a new video of the game.
It went a lot better although we didn’t get done until late in the day. I’ll make the video tomorrow!
We just finished a train wreck, hilarious, Cribbage Rumble game with our brand new board from Michaud Toys this afternoon (it must have been 3 hrs!). We’ll put something together tomorrow on video if we can manage it!
Go Retire Psychiatrist 