This just in; we found a Crib Wars game on Amazon for only $20! I’ll have a lot more to say about Crib Wars/Cribbage Wars tomorrow.
We’ve been thinking about taking this game out for a spin for a while.
Sena also ordered something called Wicked Cribbage. I don’t know anything about it except it’s a deck of special cards which gives you a chance to cheat during a regular cribbage game. It’s yet another Calvinball cribbage item similar in nature to games like Crib Wars.
This reminds me of another variant we used to have: Chicago Cribbage. We don’t have it anymore, but it’s pretty complicated and the rules are on the web. In fact, I just found out that our demonstration of it is posted on BoardGameGeek. It also comes with a special card deck which has cards that allow you to essentially penalize your opponent.
Another Calvinball crib variant we messed around with was Zombie Cribbage about 3 years ago. It comes with a rickety 61-hole folding plastic board that often got stuck closed and the pegs were plastic zombie figurines!
One of the Zombie Cribbage variants involved using jokers although the rules for using them was tough to figure out. There were two female and two male zombies. One of the guys had a big hole in his chest and was missing an arm, which is actually normal for zombies. The cards are decorated with zombies.
We also considered trying to invent a mashup of Zombie and Chicago cribbage that we could call Chicago Zombie Cribbage. If you played your reverse counting card, you could tell your opponent, “Walk like a zombie, only backwards!” That never got off the ground, or should I say out of the grave?
Our zombie cribbage game YouTube video is at the top of a google search, but only because there are no similar videos made, apparently! There are plenty of mistakes in it, but it didn’t really matter. It got over 300 views. We don’t have the game anymore.
And the other news is even more absorbing. I’m not sure how it happened, but a squirrel got in the house and took a few bites from my pumpkin spice cake. And it brought a cribbage board, but forgot a deck of cards!
And another thing! We just found out that the Michaud Toys company has again today replaced the message (missing in the last couple of days) that U.S. orders are subject to a 35% tariff and a 25% UPS brokerage fee paid before delivery!
I watched the Svengoolie show 1969 movie, “The Valley of Grungi” on Saturday. Sorry, that’s Gwangi. That was a pretty good day for TV. I saw “Men in Black” on cable, which is rare. We also saw the Iowa Hawkeye vs Oregon Ducks football game. Too bad they lost, and by only 2 points.
Anyway, “The Valley of Gwangi” was released in 1969, was directed by Jim O’Connolly, and featured the stop motion wizardry of Ray Harryhausen. It starred James Franciscus as Friar Tuck (oops, different movie), I mean Tuck Kirby, Gila Golan as T.J. Breckenridge, and Laurence Naismith as paleontologist Professor Bromley. Franciscus and Bromley both won Academy awards for “Whitest Teeth on the Planet.” Sena watched the show intermittently while flipping channels but noticed the brilliant white teeth.
But really white teeth were not the only bright spots in the film. I’ll let you know if I think of any others.
The main idea of the story is that Tuck and T.J. have this dysfunctional relationship based on Tuck’s inability to settle down and stop being a jive hustler, which happens to also be T.J.’s problem, frankly. T.J. is in this decaying wild west rodeo show which barely supports a living and Tuck is chasing a dream of a ranch in Wyoming and wants T.J. to team up with him.
But they get distracted by a paleontologist, a little horse (Eohippus) from the dinosaur age millions of years ago, and a valley containing giant lizards like an Allosaurus, a Styracosaurus, and a Pteranodon.
But they left out the dinosaur the remains of which were recently found in Montana: the dreaded dome-headed dinosaur, Brontotholus harmoni, a frequent combatant in mud-wrestling contests with Fred Flintstone.
But Bromley has his eyes set on capturing the Eohippus for scientific study (hah!), scheming to raise a corral full of Eohippi (is that the plural?), apparently to sell to people like Tuck and T.J. who have a fixation on ranches and wild west shows but can’t get along with each other long enough to run a lemonade stand.
Most of the action involves cowpokes falling off their horses while attempting to rope the dinosaurs with lariats clearly not strong enough to hold a 2-ton Allosaurus. Yet they manage to subdue it and drag it back to the wild west show arena where they make it dance to the tune Putting on the Ritz, which it apparently hated.
One of the characters in the movie is a boy named Lope, who is smart enough to stay out of some trouble than the boy Juanito in the movie “The Black Scorpion” but still manages to get nabbed by the Pteranodon, from which he has to be rescued. He is also pretty much cut from the same cloth as Tuck and TJ in that he’s a clever hustler and a matchmaker as well. Later, both Juanito and Lope team up in the combination sequel to both of these movies, “Misfit Monkeyshines and the Dome-Headed Dinosaur.” More stop action magic that you should not miss!
This movie is just a bit better than fair and I give it a 3/5 shrilling chicken rating.
Today we went back to playing standard 6-card cribbage and it was a relief! After all of the Calvinball cribbage variations we’ve been muddling through, getting back to a standard game felt great.
I thought of a name for an imaginary group that comes up with all of the cribbage variations (whether they exist or not): the Calvinball Cribbage Crowd (CCC). The name “Calvinball crib” came from a Reddit thread contributor who replied to someone who posted an inquiry if anyone had ever played 10 card cribbage. The answer was “Yes, there have been many many posts of Calvinball crib.”
Actually, there’s another instance of the Calvinball name applied to cribbage on Reddit. It occurred on a different topic with a lot of comments about how to teach cribbage to someone else: “Cribbage is basically Calvinball.”
If you just google the term “Calvinball cribbage” you’ll find my blog posts using it in the titles in the last week.
As a reminder, the word “Calvinball” comes from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip series which ran in the papers between 1985-1995. It’s even defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word is used mainly in North America. The definition as it relates to cribbage is that it refers to the creation of a so many different rules made by different cribbage players that it ultimately leads to a sense of chaos in that there seems to be no consistent set of rules at all.
Anyway, as we played some of the cribbage variations that include increasing numbers of playing cards, I began to wonder why there isn’t a 12-card cribbage ever listed. That’s because the so-called 11 and 13 card variants are listed on the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) website, yet there’s no mention of a 12-card variant.
What gives? Is this a ploy to confuse the public about cribbage? Is the CCC a secret splinter group of the ACC? And is the CCC attempting to subvert the effort to maintain the supremacy of the classic standard 6-card game?
Let’s hope so (I’m only kidding). But this line of thought probably led to Sena asking if the United Kingdom has a national cribbage organization like the ACC in North America. I googled it for the first time today. In 2017, the United Kingdom Cribbage Association (UKCA) was formed to address the declining popularity of cribbage in the country, which actually got started there by Sir John Suckling in the 17th century. Recall the ACC got started in 1980.
Naturally, that prompts the question of how common is Calvinball cribbage in the UKCA? You knew I was going to say that and don’t try to deny it. It’s difficult to answer. It looks like they prefer the 6-card game to 121 also although, admittedly, I didn’t investigate it thoroughly. They seem to be more conservative. So far, I don’t see any evidence (yet) for a UK chapter of the CCC. Of course this leads to the conspiracy theory (why not?) of the UK colluding with the Canadians to create the secret CCC in an effort to undermine the popularity of standard cribbage in northwestern and northeastern U.S. (where cribbage is very popular) and instead promote a collection of Calvinball crib variations to preoccupy Americans with counting endless complicated scoring combinations that prevent the completion of any games which typically last several hours and lead to starvation, exhaustion, confusion (did you say there are 40 fifteens for two or 142?), hemorrhoids from sitting too long, and the dreaded cankles.
In case you think I’m exaggerating, try to answer this question: Why is there no information whatsoever on 12-card cribbage? Don’t include AI instructions because they are confabulated.
Today, Sena “suggested” that we try make up our own version of the 11-card cribbage rumor. Recall that I picked up the idea from the American Cribbage Congress (ACC) web site that two of the many variations of cribbage are the 11 and 13 card games. I had e-mailed the ACC on Friday (two days ago) about the rules for them.
Based on the other oddball variants we’ve experimented on since last week (see my post, “Oddball Cribbage Variants Marathon Today and a Catatonic Squirrel!”), we dealt 11 cards, threw one card to the dealer’s crib, inspected our hands and tossed 3 more cards to the crib, making the crib 7 cards. That left 8 cards in our hands.
Predictably, pegging was not a big event, but counting the outrageously high hands and crib was. We had to use the cribbage scorer program developed by someone pitching the 9-card cribbage game on a Reddit cribbage thread.
It works sometimes but there is a hiccup with it not allowing input of face cards, which leads to problematic scoring. But for the most part, it works.
The short story is that we scored so high that we played only 3 hands before Sena won! Did that make the game faster? No, of course not. We spent over an hour trying to count our hands and cribs and that includes manual counting and giving up and resorting to the scorer program.
Sena’s 1st hand was 58 points according to the scorer: fifteens for 40 points; runs were 12; pairs were 6. Her cards are above the board (she was pone) and my 8-card hand and 7 card crib are below the board. The 2nd and 3rd hand were also horrendous. Sena won.
When we finished, I noticed that the ACC expert had answered my email. He had just got back from a big ACC tournament in Reno, Nevada. He asked several cribbage pros about the 11 and 13 card variants. Nobody had even heard of them, much less played them. He even asked the editor of Cribbage World magazine, his usual contact for questions like ours. He’s never heard of either one of the variants. This is despite their being mentioned on the ACC Article Library, quoted below:
“Did you know that there are at least 18 variations to the BASIC game of cribbage? There is the basic 2 or 4 handed game, and then there are the 5 card, 7 card, 11 card and 13 card cribbage games.”
I think that settles the question about the 11 and 13 card variations. They are part of the fascinating mythology of cribbage. I’m sure there’s more.
We visited the Terry Trueblood Trail and relaxed. The temperature was in the 60s, just a little on the breezy side. Everything seemed to move slower, except for the lady bugs which tried to keep warm by landing on us everywhere they could. I thought they would get into my rolled up blue jean cuffs, but amazingly they did not.
There was a small, brave patch of asters hanging on for dear life, literally. We both loved the red tree and you can tell which one it is in the video. I should know what kind of tree it is, but for now I guess just seeing it was good enough.
The cedar waxwings were flitting around maniacally and sometimes that means they’re getting smashed on fermented berries. But I didn’t see that there was enough on the branches for a party.
A pelican lazily swam across the lake in a way that suggested that it’s OK to just relax. What’s the hurry?
We might have seen one of the last northern shovelers (a dabbling duck) still hanging around. It’s like it was saying, “There’s still plenty of time.”
Whether that’s true or not, slowing down doesn’t hurt at all.
I’m going to take a chance and mention tariffs in this post because it figures importantly in our cribbage game pastime. We have several cribbage boards we’ve bought over the years and one of them is from Ontario, Canada.
Michaud Toys is a company in Ontario which makes very nice wooden toys, many of them board games. It’s a small, family-owned craft shop in Ontario not far from the Niagara area. They are well-known for making excellent wooden toys, games, and puzzle boxes. A little over 6 years ago, we bought a jumbo cribbage board from them at a reasonable price. I think it was about $70.
It came with a nice storage bag, some metal pegs (2 inches long), a deck of cards, and a set of very accurate rules. It’s 27 ½” long and 8” wide. It’s great fun to play on. We feature it in several of our cribbage game YouTube videos.
It has a handy little cubby on the board which can hold the card deck, pegs, and rule booklet. This is covered by a cap which fits snugly over the hole and is secured by “powerful rare earth magnets.” They work. I can turn the board upside down and shake it—nothing pops out.
This is a novelty board which is sold as Cribbage Rumble although the web link has “cribbage wars” in it. That should ring a bell to anyone who has heard of the game with the name “Cribbage Wars.” We’ve never played Cribbage Wars but Cribbage Rumble resembles it. Cribbage War sells for about $20 or so. Cribbage Rumble is prettier—but it costs a lot more.
We’ve been playing several cribbage game variants lately. We were looking for yet another one, checked out the price of Cribbage Rumble and found out it includes a high tariff, which the company tells you about in bold red type with exclamation marks after it. It doesn’t use the word “tariff.”
I don’t know much about tariffs except that they’re taxes. The last time I interviewed President Trump, he was pretty enthusiastic about them (satire).
Tariffs work both ways. I don’t really know anything else about them. But they’re going to delay our purchase of Cribbage Rumble.
I wonder if a Cribbage Rumble match could be arranged between President Trump and Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney to settle this tariff business? I won the Cribbage Pro match with President Trump (satire). If President Trump wins, I get the Cribbage Rumble game free. If Prime Minister Carney wins—it stays on the shelf at Michaud Toys.
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.
Sena noticed that I didn’t roll up my trousers the way you’re supposed to do it. I had no idea. I guess you’re supposed to double roll the bottoms of your trousers.
I got to wondering how James Dean rolled the bottom of his jeans. It turns out he didn’t, at least in the film “Rebel Without a Clue” (excuse me, “…without a cause”).
My jeans are a little on the long side and, as usual, that makes me wonder if I’m shrinking as a I get older. Height shrinkage is normal at my age.
Anyway, she double-rolled the bottoms of my jeans—the proper way. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s lines in his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
“I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
By the way, this reminds me that we’ll be turning our clocks back by one hour tomorrow. I usually prefer doing it the day before, which always disorients Sena, but makes me feel ahead of the game. But there’s no reason to do it earlier—except to feel an hour younger and to give me a little more time to get the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
I stopped by the Storyshucker blog today and it sent me on a wave of nostalgia. You really out to stop by Stuart Perkins’ blog and get that feeling. You can read his post, “Baby Bear” in The Local Scoop Magazine. The link is on my menu, so there’s no excuse!
Stuart has his baby bear and, although I don’t have keepsakes going that far back, it sent me back. It reminded me of our last move (I hate moving!). We have this piggy bank we toss loose change into. I can’t remember when we first got it, ages ago. When we moved last year, we tried to get all the coins in it into our bank, but they wouldn’t just count them and deposit the amount—I had to learn how to roll and wrap them myself! That’s not a great memory.
I had a spark plug gap measuring tool and that was back in the day when guys adjusted stuff like that by hand when tuning up their car engines. It’s a good thing I don’t do that anymore. I accidentally hit the accelerator instead of the brake one time and put a dent in the garage wall. That’s not such a great memory, either.
We used to have an old vintage calculator I used when I was a student at Iowa State University. Memories linked to that are a little better.
We lose track of some things from our past and that can be a good thing occasionally. Guys like Stuart know what’s worth keeping.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 