Learn Cribbage

Cribbage is easy to learn and takes a lifetime to master. These guides cover everything from the first deal to the finer points of pegging — written by players, for players. Start with the rules, then work your way up.

Start here

Complete Rules of Cribbage The whole game, start to finish: the deal, the discard, the play, the show, and how to win. Covers 2, 3, and 4-player games. Scoring Guide & Reference Chart Every way to score a point in cribbage, with a printable chart, worked examples, and the mistakes beginners make most.

Play the standard game

Two-Player Cribbage The six-card two-handed game in full — and why the deal itself is worth about two points. How to Count Fast The fixed order, the parity check that catches most errors, and a ten-minute drill.

Get better

Discard Strategy The single most important decision in cribbage. What to throw to your own crib, what to keep from your opponent's, and why. Pegging Strategy Leads, traps, counting to 31, and how to squeeze points out of the play. Worth 3–5 points a game against an equal opponent.

Go deeper

Glossary of Cribbage Terms Nobs, nibs, muggins, skunk, stinkhole, pair royal — every bit of cribbage jargon, defined plainly. Cribbage Variants Five-card, seven-card, partnership, Lowball, solitaire and more — how the family tree of cribbage branches out. The History of Cribbage From a 17th-century English poet to submarine wardrooms and pub leagues. Four hundred years of a nearly unchanged game. The 29 Hand & Scoring Oddities The perfect hand, the scores that are mathematically impossible, and the odds behind cribbage's rarest moments. The Cribbage Board Explained Why you peg with two pegs, what the streets and the skunk line are, and the pegging errors that lose games.

Tools & data

Two of these are computed rather than written: we ran every possible cribbage hand through the same scoring engine that referees live games here, and published what came back. As far as we know the full tables are not available anywhere else.

Cribbage Hand Calculator Pick any four cards and a starter and see the count — with every fifteen, pair and run listed on its own line. Cribbage Hand Odds How often every score from 0 to 29 really happens, counted across all 12,994,800 hands. The average hand is 4.77. The Best Hands to Keep The expected value of all 1,820 four-card keeps, so you can see what a hand is worth before the cut. What Your Discard Is Worth Every two-card throw valued across 58,800 possible cribs. A 5 costs you 2.15 points; throwing suited is worth 0.04. Common Mistakes, Ranked The ten errors that quietly decide games, in order of what each one actually costs you.

New to the game? Read this first

Cribbage is a card game for two to four players, played with a standard 52-card deck and scored on a wooden board with pegs. Each player is dealt a hand, sets aside cards for an extra hand called the crib that belongs to the dealer, and then plays cards one at a time toward a running count of 31. Points come from making fifteens, pairs, and runs — first during the play, then again when each hand is counted at the end.

The first player to peg 121 points wins. A typical game lasts eight to twelve deals and about twenty minutes. The scoring is the part that takes practice, which is why our scoring guide is the page most players come back to.

The fastest way to learn is to play a few hands with something else doing the counting for you. That is precisely what Cribbage Den does — the server counts every hand automatically, so you can concentrate on the decisions instead of the arithmetic.

Which guide should you read first?

The library is meant to be read in roughly the order below, but each guide stands on its own if you already know the game and came looking for one answer.

You have never played. Start with the complete rules, then play a hand or two against the computer with the counting switched off in your head. Come back to the scoring guide once the shape of a deal makes sense — it will mean far more after you have seen one.
You can play but you keep missing points. Go straight to the scoring guide. Nearly all dropped points come from three places: forgetting that the starter card joins your hand, missing that a run of three inside four cards can score twice, and not spotting fifteens that use three or four cards rather than two.
You count well but lose anyway. This is the most common plateau, and it is a discard problem far more often than a pegging problem. Read the discard guide first, then pegging. Good pegging is worth perhaps three to five points a game against an equal opponent; a consistently bad discard costs more than that.
Someone at your table said a word you didn't know. The glossary covers nobs, nibs, muggins, the stinkhole and the rest — including the ones that mean different things in different places.
You want to settle an argument. The rules guide flags the points that most often cause disputes, and the variants guide covers the family of games that get called "cribbage" but are not the standard six-card game.

How these guides are written

Every scoring example on these pages is a real counted hand, not an illustration — and each one is checked against the same scoring engine that referees live games on this site. Where a rule varies from table to table we say so and name it as a house rule rather than presenting one habit as the rule. Where we give strategy rather than rules, we say which it is, because cribbage strategy is genuinely contested in places and a confident sentence about a close discard is worth less than an honest one about why it is close. There is more on that in about the Den.

Ready to try a hand? Play free against the computer — no account needed.

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