Practicing CrossCribb and Kings Cribbage

We’ve been practicing CrossCribb and Kings Cribbage. They don’t play anything like regular cribbage, but they’re both really fun.

CrossCribb plays faster than Kings Cribbage so we played it first. Although we weren’t sure what the rule meant by saying one way to win is by “15 points or less” in a game that goes only to 31 points, we still thought it made us think about our strategy—for blocking each other.

What confused us at first is which side of the board each of is supposed to play on. In the two-player version, you sort of sit kitty corner, catty corner, or kattywumpus to each other, depending on what part of the United States you’re from. This is because one person faces the columns marked with circles and the other faces the columns marked with diamonds. That’s what the instructions tell you.

Like in regular cribbage, you choose the dealer by cutting the deck and low card gets the deal. Deal 14 cards each face down and no peeking. Non-dealer cuts and dealer turns over the cut card as usual, but places it in the center of the board.

Non-dealer leads by playing a card to anywhere on the board, which is divided into 5×5 grid, which will give 5 hands to each player to score after cards are played to each rectangular spot. You alternate play but you have to remember to toss two of your cards to the dealer’s crib, which are placed under the very handsome Dealer’s Crib chip, which reminds you of Las Vegas.

The idea is to strategically place your cards to build high scoring cribbage hands while blocking your opponent from doing the same.

The center row and column will score the Nob Jack point for you if you play a card on one of those spots. Remember, the cut card is in the center and if it’s a Jack, the dealer scores two points. However, these are not scored until after all the hands are formed on the board.

You win if you get to 31 first, which is marked in a little schematic of a cribbage scoring board on the scoresheet. However, you also win if:

You win by 15 points or less (we confess we’re not sure yet how that works)

You win by 16 points or more, which is a skunk

You win by 31 points, which is a double skunk

We each won a game, if we played it right. We’ll get this sorted out before we make a video—we hope.

Kings Cribbage is a slower game. We played for what felt like almost an hour and a half. It seemed a little more difficult to get the hang of it, even though we play Scrabble, and Kings Cribbage is a marriage of Scrabble and Cribbage. You form cribbage hands instead of words.

The tiles are made of wood, with two different colors to represent two different suits so you can’t peek when you pick your five tiles. The tiles represent cards. First you each pick tiles to see who plays first. Low tile gets first play and can play two to five tiles anywhere on the board as long as they make valid cribbage hands. After that you can play from one to five tiles, replenishing after each play.

The board rotates so you can see what you’re doing. The first player gets a 10-point bonus right off the bat—which helped me. Normally, I lose about every Scrabble game we play, but I won this time, even without the bonus. You can only play cribbage hands that are at most five tiles long.

Those of you who know how to play each of these games can check our work. We’d appreciate it if you commented on any mistakes you find.

Cribbage Board Games Arrive!

Kings Cribbage and CrossCribb are here! I had a quick look at the rules for both and they don’t look complicated. We’re ahead because we already know how to score cribbage hands.

The packages contained everything you need and nothing was broken. CrossCribb even has a handsome medallion to identify who’s the dealer and gets the crib.

We may put together a video pretty soon, after we’ve played a few games.

New Hawkeye Wave Anthem Strong Contender

I formally nominated “I Lived” by OneRepublic to be the new Hawkeye Wave Anthem. On the other hand, I just noticed there is a strong contender for the new Hawkeye Wave song. Dalles Jacobus is a former Hawkeye football player who recently submitted his song, “We Wave.”

He has a lot going for him. He’s a former Iowa football player, He recently graduated from the University of Iowa. He wrote his own song, “We Wave.” He taught himself how to play the guitar by watching YouTube. And there is growing support for the song.

He’s Iowa grown and that’s a real plus for this song. The melody itself feels like a wave. And what Dalles himself says about the song puts the emphasis right where it needs to be, “But, you know, at the end of the day it’s not about the song that’s playing, it’s about the act and the actual wave.”

Featured image picture credit: Pixydotorg.

Cribbage Revival!

I ran across this article in the Portland Press Herald the other day about the renaissance of cribbage since the pandemic began a couple of years ago. It was about that time that Sena and I began again to play cribbage (in November of 2019 to be exact) after about 20 years hiatus.

We picked up the basic rules fairly quickly. It takes a while to master the game though. We are by no means masters.

In the story there is speculation that they can tell that there has been about a 20% increase in interest in cribbage because that’s about the rate at which new cribbage boards are being purchased. It’s assumed that once you have a cribbage board you don’t really want or need another one.

That’s not the case with me and Sena. We’ve purchased about a half a dozen over the last two years. To be sure, they’re not all boards. The Chicago Cribbage game variant doesn’t have a board with it but has several modifications of the rules as well as handsome cards. And we’re going to get a couple of cribbage board games, Kings Cribbage and CrossCribb.

The comments are very interesting below the story. One person claimed that his grandfather abruptly stopped teaching him cribbage when he got 29 scores in both the hand and the crib. Another commenter pointed out that this was mathematically impossible since you’d have to have more than 7 fives in the deck. Another commenter indicated that it was possible. I’m not sure what to say about the knowledge base of some cribbage players.

The story quotes David Aiken, a board member of the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) and editor of Cribbage World. He said that cribbage has been an older person’s game, for the most part. A lot of the cribbage clubs that had sponsored tournaments stopped hosting them. But that’s starting to turn around.

The story also says that cribbage takes a long time to learn and that it’s about equal parts luck and skill.

That got me to searching around on the web for other stories about cribbage and it finally led me to a story about a guy named Rollie Heath.

Rollie says the game is about 90% luck and about 15 percent skill. That’s pretty darn close to what another cribbage master said about the breakdown of luck and skill, Frank Lake. Rally mentioned the Theory of 26. This was invented by another cribbage master named DeLynn Colvert. I have Colvert’s book but have not read the chapter on the Theory of 26. Nor do I plan to, anytime soon. The gist of it is that luck controls most of the game and skill revolves around each player fighting over the 10 or so points that can actually be controlled by how you play the cards you’re dealt—I think.

Okay, okay, so I’ll read a little bit about Colvert’s 26 Theory to you. Colvert says, per hand that the non-dealer will peg on average 10.2 points. The dealer will peg 16.2 points per hand on average. Every two deals the average points add up to 26.4. Colvert goes on to say:

“The cribbage law of averages dictates that the dealer will win the game by scoring his crib hand on the 9th deal. The non-dealer will be about five (5.2) points short after counting first on the ninth hand. And this crucial five points will, on the average, caused the non-dealer to lose 56 games of 100 (skill levels being equal, of course). These averages are the foundation of the “Twenty Six Theory.”

I could probably sound real smart here by saying that nobody plays a purely statistical average game. But I’m not going to cop out. I’m just not smart enough to use the 26 Theory. More than anything, Sena and I play cribbage just for fun. I think that’s what most of us do.

On the other hand, Rollie Heath has been inducted into the ACC Hall of Fame. Maybe we should ask Rollie whether you can have 29 scores in both your hand and your crib.

New Cribbage Board Games Shipped!

We have a couple of new cribbage board games shipping early. They might arrive as early as tomorrow. These aren’t just cribbage boards.

One of them is Kings Cribbage. It’s kind of a cross between Scrabble and cribbage. Great, another game Sena can win nearly every time. Tiles correspond to cards. There are only two suits, light and dark brown. You have to try to make the highest scoring cribbage hand. You can score in multiple rows and columns at the same time. They have to be standard cribbage scores. I couldn’t find a YouTube instructional video per se, but the rules are on the web.

I did find a couple of reviews that were interesting and informative, though. It sounds like gameplay can make for complicated strategy building. And like the Tile Lock Scrabble game, the board has rails to keep the tiles in place. You can also spin the board around. The 6 and the 9 tiles are interchangeable. The

The other game is CrossCribb. The rules are also the web. The idea is to peg 31 points on your scorecard before your opponent cab do so. Two players to four players build hands perpendicular to each other.

They sound like fun variations on cribbage. We can’t wait to play!

Featured image picture credit: Pixydotorg.

Not Ambivalent I’m A Hawkeye

I searched the web for a picture of ambivalence and had a tough time finding one. The featured image comes close. The reason I’m ambivalent is because of a conflict I have about the Iowa Hawkeye football program, which is currently the subject of a lawsuit by former African American players compared to the University of Iowa asking fans to find a new song to accompany the traditional Hawkeye Wave, in which players and fans wave at the kids watching the game from the UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital.

I think it’s a moving gesture. I’d like to formally nominate a new song. But I’m not sure I could call myself a fan, given the conflict between two principles: honoring the families with sick children, and also wanting a just outcome for the former football players suing the Hawkeye football program, alleging that it created a hostile environment.

I dislike bringing this up, mainly because I want to be fair to both sides. On the one hand, the former Hawkeye players and the Hawkeye football program somehow need to find justice. On the other, I really believe families love the Hawkeye Wave, and so do I. I’m very ambivalent.

I even have a song I’d like to formally vote for. It’s “I Lived” by OneRepublic. It was originally dedicated to children with cystic fibrosis and, when the music video was released in 2014, it featured Bryan Warnecke, a 15-year-old showing how he not only lived with, but triumphed over the disease.

I want the best for both sides of this conflict between ideals. I don’t know if I can count myself as a fan of the Hawkeye football program right now.

But speaking as a retired University of Iowa general hospital psychiatric consultant who once served as a colleague to the pulmonology specialists who called me to help care for the emotional and physical health of their patients with cystic fibrosis, a few of whom were living into young adulthood—they are Hawkeyes and so am I.

So, I’m voting informally for “I Lived” because I think it captures the spirit of what the Hawkeye Wave is really all about—kindness, generosity, and hope.

Featured image picture credit Pixabaydotcom.

Update April 24, 2022: I voted formally today for “I Lived” by OneRepublic. You can submit yours here.

Unboxing The Lucid Mattress Topper

Remember the Zinus platform bed and mattress (bed in a box) story? The mattress was a little on the firm side for Sena, so she ordered a Lucid 3-inch gel foam topper for it.

We got it. It’s a memory foam mattress topper, with cooling gel and aloe infused with a plush cover. It was coiled up in box, and exploded like a nuclear bomb after we opened it. We’ll have to replace the bedroom wall, but otherwise it’s a pretty nice little topper.

Just kidding.

Lucid gives you a handy little knife to cut the plastic, which worked pretty slick. The memory foam has ventilation holes to release the heat that can build up, create a 4 alarm fire, burn down your house, make you homeless for a couple years, living in a refrigerator carton over a sidewalk sewer grate which on average allows one person to fall through every 20 months in case you’re wondering, leading to meeting new people occasionally who report you to the police, who arrest you for vagrancy, though most judges are lenient, resulting in a 3 day stay hotel voucher where you can pick up a few square meals and a dozen or so bedbugs, sending you the hospital ER for treatment, after which a social worker arranges for you to move into a low budget condo with a Home Owners Association with rules against platform beds with memory foam toppers, protecting you for life as long as you don’t plant creeping charley in your side yard.

The topper flattened out in about half an hour. Sena was having to sort of jump up to get on the bed before, so now she’ll need a stepladder or a jet pack.

‘da Friday Blues with Big Mo

OK, so just heard this song “Jumpin’ Jack Rabbit” by Catfish Keith, playing on KCCK Big Mo Blues Show. I’ve looked for the lyrics and can’t find them. Anyway it was interesting, but puzzling.

I don’t know anything about guitars and never heard of Principato, but this is unreal.

Lucky Spring Birds Are Back!

We finally got a sunny break yesterday and headed out to the Terry Trueblood Trail for a walk. It was good to stretch our legs. The spring birds are back. The Tree Swallow nest boxes are installed, although one of them was upside down. I’m not sure how that happens. A sparrow chased one of the swallows off, probably staking a claim on one of the nest boxes. Lucky break for the sparrow. Lucky for all that the nest boxes were available; unlucky if some are upside down, though.

The great weather was a lucky break, actually. Rain is in the forecast for the next couple of days. Talk about luck. We both got lucky playing cribbage the other day. Sena got a double run of 2 through 5 counting the cut card—and so did I. We both got 12 points. I had the crib, and got 12 more. Neither of us can recall what we threw to my crib.

Luck is important in cribbage. An expert player, Frank Lake, once said that cribbage is 85% luck and 15% skill. Others back him up.

Some say it’s often better to be lucky than good.

ACIP Meeting on Covid-19 Vaccines and Boosters Held on April 20, 2022

I got to listen to some of the presentations yesterday during the ACIP meeting on Covid-19 vaccines and boosters. My impression is that there seems to still be some discussion about what the most important goals of the vaccination program. Is it to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death? Or is it to prevent infection altogether?

It’s not lost on me that even mild infection with Covid-19 can lead to a chronic (“long haul”) syndrome. On the other hand, it doesn’t sound plausible that a vaccine to prevent infection would even be possible, given that so many people remain unvaccinated. That’s part of the context for the rise of variants that can lead to vaccine-resistant strains. That can lead to boosters and what some ACIP committee members are now afraid might lead to a new vogue term-“booster fatigue.”

Sena and I are now immunized as far as we can go, with 4 doses. We’re hoping for a new vaccine that is safe, effective against variants, and doesn’t involve boosting every few months.

We focus a lot on vaccines. But the other side of the risk of getting infected and sick are a part of host immunity. It gets weaker as we get older. It’s weak in those who are immunocompromised for other reasons, including things like underlying diseases and organ transplantation.

Looking at other ways to prevent disease with Covid-19, such as new medications that might counter the decline of the immune system as we age, and any other innovations are also important.