So, as long as we had the cribbage tournament board out, we decided to play 10 card cribbage yesterday. This is not a game for mindfulness, at least for me. Each player gets 10 cards. You have to sort them into two 4 card hands and the dealer gets the usual 4 card crib.
That’s a lot of cards to sort through. I get a little flustered trying to figure out what to keep and what to throw to the crib. I have to decide which 4 card hand to start the play.
The more cards you have, the higher the scores. Some games take only about 15 minutes despite the plethora of scores you have to wade through. Overall, in tournaments you have to be able to play a 6-card game in 15 minutes, so it seems ironic you can do the same in a 10-card game.
You have to be mindful, in a way, to play these Calvinball crib variations. But I can get a little hyped. Maybe you can tell.
Well, we did manage to get through a hybrid of 10-card Cribbage and Crib Wars although I had a kerfuffle with pegging which led to extra points I shouldn’t have got. I probably made other mistakes (just let me know).
However, it probably didn’t make that much difference. As luck would have it (as it tends to do in cribbage and in life) I won mainly because Sena ended up going through the final Blue Time Trap twice!
Here’s a recap of the rules for 10-card Cribbage: This one is fun. Deal 10 cards each and two to the dealer’s crib. Divide your remaining 8 cards into 4 separate hands. Use one for pegging and both for the show (means scoring your hands). Play to 121 (unless you’re playing Crib Wars and then you’re in for a marathon). You get big scores but they’re manageable.
We completed the game in an hour, very similar to our time in regular 6 card cribbage on the big Ebonwood Crib Wars board. I started to get a little punchy mid to late phase in the game because of the several hands you get in 10-card cribbage. It’s a lot to count.
High scores over the long haul probably don’t affect what fairways and sand traps you fall into.
If you already know how to play basic cribbage, you can ignore most of what’s on the rules sheet (available on the web) because there’s only a short section for the Crib Wars rules. It describes the colored areas and what the players are supposed to do with them.
There’s no Muggers Alley on the Ebonwood 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.
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 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!
The Wicked Cribbage Lugger card gave us the idea of trying a hybrid game of 10-card cribbage and Crib Wars today. I can’t contain myself; I finally won!
The rules for 10-card cribbage are on the Lugger card from the Wicked Cribbage game although we’ve played it before. We finished the game in 1 hour and 15 minutes. This is despite the confusion from having 3 piles of cards in front of you when you’re the dealer (your regular 4-card hand, the other 4-card hand, and your crib).
It actually plays pretty well, and the scores are easier to count than the 9-card variant because there are only 4 cards to count at a time. I managed to skip all the Red Skip Zones, all the Blue Time Traps, and all the Blue Penalty Zones, but also missed out on the Green Advance Zones. Sena cycled through one of the Blue Time Traps three times.
Sena relies on strategy in card play for Crib Wars and it doesn’t always work. I think luck is the biggest factor, but that doesn’t mean I relax. Sorting through my cards to pick out the best two 4-card hands was tough. We both agree that picking out the two cards to throw to the dealer’s crib was the easy part. Counting holes on the board was a chore because they’re very small. The number of holes in a group can vary a lot. Standard cribbage board holes are always 5 in a group.
I’m still leery of trying to film us playing a game of Crib Wars. The time to play is still way too long for that, mostly because of all the water hazards and sand traps. By the way, why do I not see comparisons of Crib Wars to golf (which I don’t play)?
Some people say that Crib Wars reminds them of Chutes and Ladders. I had to look this up on the web (despite having played this as a kid), but in Chutes and Ladders, chutes slow you down and ladders speed you up. So, it isn’t just the board layout alone of Crib Wars that reminds people of Chutes and Ladders.
Sena and I talked about what cribbage game variant we like best so far as a hybrid with Crib Wars. She kind of likes 9-card but settled on 7-card. I tend to agree with her because, while I think 6-card cribbage might tend to make the game seem too slow after a while, the 7-card might better rather than trying to manage too many cards, even though you can get some pretty high scores in 7-card.
Overall, we both like Crib Wars. It’s fun and absorbing and we’ll probably keep playing. At between $25-30, the price is right.
All morning long today we played the oddball cribbage variants and we are wiped out! It’ll drive me to drink!
Sena is to blame for this. She “suggested” we play all 4 of the new multi-card weird cribbage variants we learned just in the last few days: 7-card, 8-card, 9-card, and 10-card. What did we learn from this? We learned one of the reasons why 6-card cribbage is the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) choice for their big grand national tournaments. Talk about needing to be able to play a cribbage in 15 minutes!
I won the 7, 8, and 9 card games and Sena won the 10-card game. We caught a squirrel on camera watching us who seemed catatonic probably because it couldn’t fathom why two people would subject themselves to this mind-bending ordeal.
You can spend an hour just trying to figure out your score for one hand in 9-card cribbage. If we had not had that cribbage scorer I found from a guy on a Reddit cribbage thread, we would not have been able to manage scoring a couple our hands. I know I said it didn’t work consistently—but it works well enough when you’re faced with scores as high as 36 and more! According to AI, the most common scores in 6-card cribbage are 4 and 2. Most cribbage scorers available on line or for smartphones are designed for 6-card cribbage, meaning you can’t enter more than 4 cards for the hand and one for the starter.
9 card cribbage hands
Thank goodness there is no information on the web for the rules of 11-card and 13-card cribbage, despite the ACC saying they are two of the many cribbage variations. If anybody asks me, “But Jim, what about the 12-card cribbage variant?” I will politely change the subject and talk about catatonic squirrels.
Sena is starting to warm up to the 8-card variant, although I’m doing my best to ignore her. It’s amazing the 10-card game is actually faster than the others and the hands are easier to count.
The only reason to play the 9-card variant is if you are tired of living. There should be a public service announcement about this game warning of the need for supplemental oxygen and K-rations because you won’t have time to do anything but mumble through the endless scoring rituals.
“OK, how many 15s for 2 do you see?”
“ZZZZZ…”
I would not play any of these variants past the 121 hole on a standard board, if you value your sanity. We agreed to play them that way. If you can’t persuade your spouse, friend, or catatonic squirrel to do that, you should consider resorting to thumb-wrestling, best 2 out of 3 falls. Seriously, playing 9-card cribbage to 363 should be considered a health hazard.
Short List of the Oddball Cribbage Variants with rules and comments (all are presumed to be for 2 players):
7-card: Deal 7 cards to each player, one to the dealer’s crib. Then look at your cards and throw 2 more cards to the dealer’s crib. There should be 5 cards in the crib and 5 cards in each player’s hand. The starter card makes 6 cards for your hand. Flushes are allowed: 4, 5, and 6 card flushes are allowed. In 4 and 5 card flushes all the cards should be in your hand. The highest score is 46 (4,4,5,6,6). I think this game has the smoothest play, but there will be hands that are difficult to score. There are 8 three-card runs for 24 points, 8 fifteens for 2 for 16 points, and 3 pairs for 6 points. Note, I found out the hard way that I can’t use the double run rule to count the runs and the pairs together to come up with the 30 points you have in pairs and 3-card runs. I missed two 3-card runs (6 points) and I could find them only by taking pictures of the double run counts including the pairs. In order to avoid missing them, it’s best to count all the runs and all the pairs separately and add them. Then add the 15 for 2 points (16).
8-card: Deal 8 cards to each player and each throw two cards to the dealer’s crib. Choose 4 cards to keep and two to the bottom of the deck. Each player then has 4 cards in their hands and uses the starter card to score with their hands. Play standard cribbage as usual to 121. This felt a little clunky at first, but you get used to it.
9-card: Carefully consider whether you really want to torture yourself with this variant—then go ahead and deal 9 cards to each player and throw 3 cards to the dealer’s crib. Play to 121. Scores will be high and challenging to count. There is one scoring program available which seems to work OK. I couldn’t put in J for Jack and make it work, but other initials like K for King seem to work. Numbers alone work best. Get the link from the Reddit thread:
10-card: This one is fun. Deal 10 cards each and two to the dealer’s crib. Divide your remaining 8 cards into 2 separate 4 card hands. Use one for pegging and both for the show (means scoring your hands). Play to 121. You get big scores but they’re more manageable.
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.
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