How to Play Cribbage

What do you need to play cribbage?

You need two players, a standard 52-card pack, and a cribbage board with two pegs per player. The standard form of cribbage is the two-player game, and that is the game this page teaches; three- and four-player forms exist and are covered at the end.

The traditional board has four rows of 30 holes, and a game to 121 points goes twice around it. You score by pegging: the back peg leapfrogs the front peg by the number of points scored, so the front peg always shows your current score while the back peg keeps your previous one. If a peg gets knocked loose, the other peg tells you where you were.

Cribbage is often shelved with the board games, but the board itself has no rules of its own. It only keeps score, and every rule that follows is about the cards.

How do you start a game?

Cut the deck to decide the first dealer:

1. Each player cuts and shows a card. Ace counts low and king counts high.
2. The lower card deals first. The dealer also owns the first crib, which is explained in the next section.
3. If the cut ties, cut again.

The dealer then shuffles, the non-dealer may cut, and the dealer deals six cards to each player, one at a time, face down. When the whole hand has been played and counted, the deal passes to the other player, and it keeps alternating for the rest of the game.

So who goes first in cribbage depends on the phase: the lower cut deals first, the non-dealer leads the first card of the play, and the non-dealer counts first at the show.

What do you do with your six cards?

Pick two cards to give up. Both players discard two face down, and those four cards form the crib, an extra hand that belongs to the dealer. The crib is set aside face down, unexamined, until the show at the end of the hand.

Suppose you are the pone (the non-dealer) and were dealt 2♠ 3♥ 6♥ 7♦ 8♠ Q♦. Keeping 2♠ 6♥ 7♦ 8♠ and discarding the 3♥ and Q♦ is one reasonable choice, shown here purely as an illustration: the four kept cards work together. We will follow this hand for the rest of the page.

Once both discards are in, the non-dealer cuts the deck and the dealer turns the top card of the lower packet face up. That card is the starter, and it will later count as part of every hand. If the starter is a jack, the dealer immediately pegs 2 for his heels. Ours is the Q♣, so no points yet.

How does the play to 31 work?

The non-dealer leads the first card, and players then take turns playing one card at a time, each onto their own face-up pile, announcing the new running total aloud. The total may never pass 31. Points are pegged the moment they happen: 2 for bringing the count to exactly 15, 2 for pairing the card played just before yours, and 1 per card for a run.

When you cannot play without passing 31, say "go". Whoever lays the last card of a sequence pegs 1, or 2 for hitting 31 exactly. The count then resets to zero, and the player who did not lay that last card leads the next sequence. The finer points live at go and 31.

Here is our hand played out. The dealer kept 4♣ 7♣ J♥ K♦.

Spoken around the table, the whole play runs "eight, fifteen, twenty-two, twenty-six, twenty-eight, go", a point for the go, then "ten, sixteen, twenty-six" and a point for the last card. Each player pegged 3.

How does the show work?

The show follows a fixed counting order: the non-dealer's hand first, then the dealer's hand, then the crib, each scored with the starter as a fifth card. Here are the values:

One exception: in the crib, a flush only counts when all five cards share a suit, per the crib flush rule; everything else in the table scores the same in a hand or the crib.

The full procedure, with a bigger worked example, is at how to score a hand. Our pone counts first: 2♠ 6♥ 7♦ 8♠ with the Q♣ starter comes to 7 points.

Spoken at the table: "fifteen 2, fifteen 4, and a run of three makes 7". There is no pair, no flush (the suits are mixed), and no jack. The dealer's hand of 4♣ 7♣ J♥ K♦ with the same starter is worth 3 for the run of J-Q-K. Last of all, the dealer turns the crib face up and counts it the same way, starter included, with the five-card flush rule as the one difference.

How do you win?

The first player to reach or pass 121 points wins, and the game ends at that instant, in whatever phase the point arrives. No exact count is needed: pegging out from hole 120 with a 2-point score still wins.

If the loser has not reached 91, the win is a skunk, commonly valued as a double game. Casual players commonly play a match as best of three, though who deals first in the next game varies from source to source, so agree on it before you start.

What about three or four players?

With three players, each is dealt five cards and one more goes straight to the crib; each player then discards one, so the crib is still four cards. The player at the dealer's left cuts the starter, leads the first card, and counts first at the show.

With four players, cribbage becomes a partnership game. Partners sit opposite each other, one member of each pair pegs for the side, and open advice between partners is barred. In both forms the show runs around the table from the dealer's left and ends with the dealer, rather than the two-player pone-then-dealer order above. The full rules for both forms, from the deal to who cuts, live at 3 and 4 player cribbage.