Reasons Why Cribbage is the Perfect Pastime

If you're a youngest child such as myself, you can probably relate to the torment of watching your older siblings blatantly exercise their privileges in front of you. Such was my experience, anyways, when I accompanied my older sibling to Best Buy after they had saved up enough years worth of birthday and Christmas money to buy a new-in-box iPod Touch. Now, I know today an iPod is just another run-of-the-mill gadget, but back in 2012 when the only devices in most households were landlines and microwaves, the iPod Touch was an enshrined artifact.

And being the youngest, I had to stand around and watch while my sibling took their precious time in the Best Buy, choosing the perfect case, earbuds, and whatever unnecessary accessories they deemed essential. Needless to say, I was jealous.

The trip wasn't a total bust though, because as a result of my evident resentment, my dad gave me ten dollars to spend at the Walmart next door. That marked the day I bought my first cribbage board, a purchase which would go on to transform my appreciation of card games forever.

If you've never heard of cribbage, you've probably at least seen its apparatus: a single plank of wood (typically 4 by 12 inches) lined with three adjacent coloured tracks of tiny holes, and complete with three sets of correspondingly coloured pegs. Outwardly, cribbage is a game of chance, but its more avid players will know that true mastery requires strategy, tactic, and skill.

Fundamentally, and so as not to overwhelm any of my unfamiliar readers, the game is a race to 121 points. Players⁠— or in some cases, teams⁠— compete against their opponents, usually by increments of two, to be the first to earn their peg's spot in that revered 121st hole at the end of the track. Not unlike a lot of card games, points are earned by combining cards into pairs, runs, flushes, and sums of fifteen. But something that sets cribbage apart is the way players respond and react to each other's moves in real time, which as journalist Clifton Mark puts it, "makes game play more like conversation than combat."

One of the best aspects of the game is the cribbage-exclusive insider slang that seems to unspokenly get passed down from player to player (my favourite example being "nineteen" which means a zero point hand). And along with the jargon, the rhythmic sing-song nature of the counting makes the whole game feel like poetry. Most competitors take it one step further by inventing their own rhymes when they count their hands. There's a good reason for that, too: cribbage was invented by Sir John Suckling, a 17th century poet, which explains the game's lyrical quality.

Since it was invented four centuries ago, cribbage has waxed in popularity. It eventually became the official game of American submariners after Dick O'Kane, an American commander, played a perfect 29-point hand right before setting off on a record-setting patrol.

And even though I'm not a reputed poet or a highly-regarded submarine commander, cribbage has been a pretty substantial part of my life. A few summers ago, my dad and I started a year-long tournament in which we played a game of cribbage every day for 365 days. A couple of times we played in the middle of the night if he got off work late, and we played online when I was travelling in the summer, but somehow we managed to keep it up for the whole year. I guess we're pretty evenly matched, because we kept track of our points, and we finished the last game of the tournament with a perfect tie.

So when I say I could play cribbage everyday, I'm talking literally. And even though I might be a little biased, the game's complex strategies, rich history, and rhythmic diction is why cribbage is the perfect pastime.