Cribbage Unblocked — Play Free Online

Cribbage is the old two-player card game played with a standard 52-card deck and a pegging board, and this page embeds the free version from cribbage-online.net. You play one-on-one against a computer opponent, and the first player to reach 121 points wins. Besides the game itself, the site menu offers a statistics page, a discard analyzer and a tutorial.

Starting a game

Choose New Game and pick one of three difficulty levels: Easy, Standard or Pro. The game then asks you to click a card from the spread deck, and whoever draws the lower card gets the first crib, which means dealing first. That matters, because only the dealer scores the crib.

A hand, step by step

1. Discard to the crib. Each player gets six cards and drops two of them into the crib area, then presses Confirm Crib Cards. The crib belongs to whoever is dealing that hand.
2. The starter. A card is cut from the rest of the deck and turned face up. If it is a jack, the dealer pegs two points straight away.
3. Pegging. Players take turns laying cards while a running count is kept on screen. Picture cards count ten and aces count one. Hitting exactly 15 or 31 scores two, pairs and runs laid in sequence score as well, and a player who cannot play without going over 31 says "Go", giving the opponent a point. The computer's own "Go" appears as a message, and you get a prompt when it is your turn to say it.
4. The show. Each hand is counted together with the starter: two points for every combination adding to 15, two for a pair, six for three of a kind, twelve for four of a kind, one point per card in a run, four for a flush in the hand (five if the starter matches), and one for holding the jack of the starter's suit. The dealer then counts the crib, where a flush only counts if all four cards and the starter share a suit.

The best possible hand is worth 29 points. The end-of-game panel can also announce a "Skunk!", and the site's guide calls a win over an opponent stuck below 61 points a double skunk.

Learning tools and settings

This version is built to teach as well as play. A Hint button suggests a play, and an optional warning tells you when a discard is not the best choice, showing the average round score your cards would produce next to the score of a better option. You can then try again, see the scores for every possible play, or keep your choice anyway. At the end of a game the summary splits both totals into pegging, hands and cribs, and counts how many suboptimal plays you made.

The settings let you count your own hands manually by clicking cards, turn on muggins, switch hints and suboptimal-play warnings on or off, speed up counting, and change the colours of the board and the card backs.

Tips from the site's strategy guide

• When it is not your crib, avoid throwing cards that make 15 together; you would be handing the dealer free points.
• Aces and kings are among the safer cards to discard into an opponent's crib.
• Do not lead with a five, since any ten-value card from the opponent turns the count into 15. A four is the highest lead that no single reply can turn into 15.