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The Cribbage Library

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.

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.

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.

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

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