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The History of Cribbage
The invention of Cribbage, Crib for short, was attributed
to the poet Sir John Suckling (1609 - 1642) by his biographer, John Aubrey.
Suckling was something of a scoundrel by all accounts. He was an
expert at cards, dice and bowls as well as being a womaniser and notorious
wit on top of his poetry day-job! His most notorious feat was began
when he distributed large numbers of packs of marked cards to the aristocratic
populace around England. He then followed up this preparation by
going around the country playing the local gentry at Cribbage for money,
managing to earn himself around £20,000 (about £4 million in today's money).
There's no hard evidence to show that Suckling was the inventor of Cribbage
and it seems to be suspiciously similar to an earlier game played in Tudor
times called Noddy, the rules for which aren't entirely clear.
A standard Cribbage board is a lesson in functional simplicity.
Each player moves a pair of pegs up the outside and down the inside of
their side of the board. The front peg shows the current score while
the rear peg shows the previous score - a device that efficiently prevents
mistakes and allows opponents to curtail any surreptious cheating.
The holes are clearly divided into sets of five, a fact that allows large
scores to be tallied immediately without counting and means that a quick
glance is all that is needed to determine who is winning and by how much.
A complete trip up and down the board is 60 holes but each end has a finishing
hole into which the winning peg is placed. Thus, games scored using
a Cribbage board are usually first to 61, 121 or 181.
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