The History of Cribbage

By most accounts, cribbage dates from England in the 1630s. Tradition credits the poet Sir John Suckling with building it from an older game called Noddy, the first printed rules appeared in the 1650s or 1660s, and the six-card game to 121 that most people play today had become the favored form by 1911. This page follows the game from Suckling's day to the American Cribbage Congress, founded in 1979, and marks where the record is thin or disputed.

Sir John Suckling and the Invention of Cribbage

Cribbage is traditionally credited to Sir John Suckling, an English poet and courtier born at Whitton, Twickenham, on 10 February 1609 and knighted in 1630. The only early source for that credit is a single line in the notes the biographer John Aubrey kept between 1669 and 1696, which Aubrey says he heard from a Mr William Beeston. Aubrey gives no date, so modern accounts place the invention in the 1630s; the American Cribbage Congress rulebook says about 1635.

The attribution is tradition, not proof. Aubrey wrote it down at least 28 years after Suckling's death, secondhand, and at least one historian of traditional games calls the story doubtful. The word cribbage itself may be older than the traditional invention date: one account citing the Oxford English Dictionary gives 1630, another says the 1620s.

Suckling had a gambler's reputation, and Aubrey's notes tell of him playing with marked cards. He fled England after the First Army Plot of May 1641 and died in Paris, most likely later that year, though several sources give 1642.

The First Printed Rules

Cribbage grew out of Noddy, a card game first recorded in 1589 in Thomas Nashe's An Almond for a Parrat. Noddy was already scored with pegs on a board. Accounts of its target differ: one puts it at 15 or 21, another, drawing on Francis Willughby's notes from around 1665 to 1670, at 61 on a 31-hole board. Every source names Noddy as the ancestor, and the American Cribbage Congress adds a second one, One-and-Thirty.

The first printed rules, for "the Gentile Game of Cribbidge", appeared in John Cotgrave's Wits Interpreter, dated 1655 in one account and 1662 in another. The Compleat Gamester of 1674, later attributed to Charles Cotton, copied Cotgrave's chapter, called the turned-up Jack "Knave Noddy", and stayed in print until 1754. In 1688 Randle Holme's Academy of Armory listed both "Cribbidge" and "Cribbidge-Noddy".

The Cribbage Board

Cribbage is scored on a board, not paper. Each player has two pegs and moves the back peg past the front one with each score, so the gap between them shows the last score and can be checked. Every design gives each player 120 scoring holes plus a game hole, the 121st.

The classic board gives each player 60 holes, 30 out and 30 back, so a game to 121 goes around it twice. American Cribbage Congress tournaments require long boards of 60 holes up and 60 down, and some boards run one continuous track of 120 holes. Players divide the course into four streets of 30 holes.

The oldest boards in one large collection of playing-card history date from the early to mid 18th century, including a silver-plated board said to date from 1775, though most boards in that collection were made between 1880 and 1920. Sailors made them too: a walrus-tusk scrimshaw board from an 1868 to 1871 whaling voyage is held by the Martha's Vineyard Museum.

Cribbage in Pubs and at Sea

Cribbage became a pub game in Britain, and the law treated it that way. Section 6 of the Gaming Act 1968 allowed cribbage and dominoes in pubs, with licensing justices able to curb high stakes; the Act has since been repealed. Charles Dickens put the game in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840 to 1841), with four-handed cribbage at Quilp's and games between Dick Swiveller and the Marchioness. The older five-card game is still played in pub leagues in South Wales, Hampshire, and Surrey.

At sea, New England sailors and fishermen took up the game, and the US submarine force keeps one famous board. In April 1943, on patrol in the Yellow Sea, Lieutenant Commander Dudley "Mush" Morton dealt his executive officer, Lieutenant Richard O'Kane, a 29 hand aboard USS Wahoo (SS-238), and Wahoo sank two freighters that night. O'Kane's original board went down with USS Tang in October 1944; the crew of the second Tang gave him a replacement in 1957. After he died in 1994 his widow gave that board to the Submarine Force. It stays with the oldest fast-attack submarine in the Pacific Fleet, USS Scranton since 2025, and moves on each time that boat leaves service.

Edmond Hoyle and How the Rules Settled

Edmond Hoyle (1672 to 1769) wrote the rulebooks behind the phrase "according to Hoyle", but between 1742 and 1751 he wrote on whist, backgammon, chess, piquet, quadrille, and brag, never on cribbage. Cribbage entered a Hoyle-branded book only after his death; one history dates it to 1796, added by Charles Jones.

The game of Hoyle's day was five-card cribbage to 61. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica described five-card as the form formerly rated the most scientific and six-card as the form then favored, the clearest dated evidence that the six-card game to 121 had taken over. The counting order still used today is pone first, then the dealer's hand, then the crib.

The American Cribbage Congress

The American Cribbage Congress (ACC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, on 6 August 1979 and incorporated in March 1980. Its founding officers were Joseph P. Wergin, James W. Arblaster, and Arnold C. Crews, and it had 561 members by the end of its first year. Today it sanctions more than 170 tournaments a year, publishes the tournament rulebook and Cribbage World magazine, and runs a national rating system, grass-roots clubs, and a Hall of Fame whose first member is Sir John Suckling.

In an ACC tournament, one in four entrants qualify for the knockout playoffs. The annual Grand National is the flagship event; the 44th is set for Niagara Falls in October 2026. Muggins is the ACC's only optional rule, played only when a tournament director announces it in advance, and ACC scoring gives 2 game points for a win and 3 for a skunk.

The ACC also rewards big hands in sanctioned play. A 29 hand earns $100 and a lapel pin, and a 28 earns a certificate. A player who always keeps J-5-5-5 sees a 29 about once in 216,580 deals.

The Mathematics of Cribbage

There are 12,994,800 combinations of a four-card hand and a starter. The average hand is worth about 4.77 points and the average crib about 4.73, 4 is the most common score, and just under 8 percent of hands score nothing. No hand can score 19, 25, 26, or 27, and players jokingly call a zero hand a "nineteen".

Only 4 of those 12,994,800 combinations score the maximum 29, about 1 in 3.2 million with random cards, and the crib has exactly 4 as well. Four 5s with a ten-card make 28, and nine different rank patterns make 24.

Computer and human discard tables turned the discard into arithmetic. They rank a pair of 5s as the best throw into your own crib, averaging 8.79 points, and 10-King as the worst at 2.84. Our cribbage strategy guide shows how to use them.

Cribbage Today

Two-player six-card cribbage to 121 is the standard game, the one the ACC rulebook is built around and the one our game plays. Five-card cribbage survives in British pub leagues, and the three-player, four-player partnership, and solitaire forms each have their own rules; the full cribbage rules cover each of them. You can play the standard game free in your browser against the computer, with every hand counted for you.