How to Play Cribbage

The Short Version

Cribbage is a card game and a race at once. Two (or three, or four) players score points in small bursts — during the play of the cards, then by counting combinations in their hands — and peg every point immediately on a wooden board of holes, two laps of 60 to a game hole at 121. Every deal has three phases: the play (called pegging), the show (counting the hands), and the crib (a bonus hand that belongs to the dealer). First peg home wins — and because the counting order is fixed, games are regularly won by a single hole.

What You Need

One standard 52-card deck and a cribbage board. The board has three tracks of 120 holes plus a game hole, and each player uses two pegs: you leapfrog them — front peg shows your current score, back peg where you were — so a miscount can always be checked. Card values for all counting: face cards count 10, aces count 1, everything else counts its number. Two players is the classic game; three- and four-player versions are covered under Variations.

Set Up

Cut the deck to decide the first dealer: low card deals (ace is low). Set both pegs at the start of your track. The dealer alternates every hand after that, and the deal matters — the crib belongs to the dealer, so dealing is an advantage that has to take turns.

How to Play

The deal and the crib. In a two-player game the dealer deals six cards to each player. Everyone then discards two cards, face down, into the crib — a fourth hand that belongs to the dealer and is scored at the end. Discard shrewdly: the dealer’s crib is found money, so feed it well on your deal and starve it on theirs. The non-dealer (the pone) then cuts the deck, and the dealer turns up the top card of the lower half — the starter — and places it face up on top of the deck. The starter belongs to every hand at counting time. If the starter is a jack, the dealer immediately pegs 2 points — his heels — before play begins.

The play (pegging). The pone leads any card, calling out its value. Players alternate laying cards face up in front of themselves, keeping a running total that may never pass 31. Face cards count 10, aces 1. You score as you play (the full table is under Scoring): hitting exactly 15, making a pair, building a run, and so on. If you cannot play a card without passing 31, say ‘go’ and your opponent keeps playing alone until they also cannot play; the last player to lay a card scores for the go, the total resets to zero, and the player who did not play last leads the next sequence. Continue until all eight cards are down; whoever plays the very last card scores for it.

The show. When the cards are played out, the hands are counted against the starter, in a strict order: pone’s hand first, then the dealer’s hand, then the crib. Each hand is four cards plus the starter making five, and the crib is counted exactly like a hand — it is the dealer’s second scoring chance, which is the whole compensation for the pone counting first. Count every combination: each separate fifteen, pair, run, and flush as set out below, and announce the total before pegging it.

Scoring

During the play:

Note the arithmetic of 31: reaching exactly 31 scores 2 total, not 2 plus a last-card point. A run doesn’t need to be played in order — 4-2-3 is a run of three — but cards from before a pair don’t combine with cards after it, and the count resets after every 31 or go.

In the show (each hand and the crib, with the starter):

Count fifteens first — most hands hide more than one. A run is counted once at its longest length; you don’t also score the shorter runs inside it. The crib flush rule is the one everyone gets wrong once: four suited crib cards with an off-suit starter score nothing, unlike a four-flush in a hand.

The best possible hand is 29: three 5s and a jack in hand, with the starter turning up the fourth 5 — the one matching the jack’s suit. Count it: each 5 makes a fifteen with the jack (4 combinations, 8 points), any three of the four 5s make another fifteen (4 combinations, 8 points), the four 5s are a double pair royal (12 points), and the jack is nobs (1 point) — 8 + 8 + 12 + 1 = 29. It happens roughly once in 216,000 hands, so count it slowly and enjoy it. The next best hand is 28. And 19 is impossible: no five-card combination scores it, which is why a zero hand is jokingly announced as ’nineteen’ at tables everywhere.

Winning

The game is to 121 points — two full laps of the board plus the game hole. Points are pegged the moment they’re scored, so the game can end in the middle of the play, mid-count, anywhere; you don’t finish the deal. Counting order therefore decides close games: in the show, the pone counts before the dealer, and the crib counts last of all, so a pone sitting on 120 with a single point in hand wins before the dealer’s enormous crib is ever looked at. If the loser hasn’t passed 90 holes when the winner goes out, they’ve been skunked — the skunk line at 90 is a real, marked line on most boards, and being caught short of it counts double in match play and double in shame everywhere.

Variations Worth Knowing

Three players: deal five cards each plus one card face down to start the crib; everyone discards one card to the crib. Each player races their own pegs on their own track, and counting order runs pone, second player, dealer, crib.

Four players (partners): partners sit opposite and share a track. Deal five cards each; everyone discards exactly one card to the dealer’s crib. Play and counting are the same, with partners’ points pegged on the shared pegs.

Five-card cribbage is the older, shorter game: deal five, discard one each (the crib gets two from the players’ discards), play to 61 instead of 121. Quick, swingy, and mostly historical now — but it’s the version many grandparents learned first.