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Where cribbage came from

The short version you will hear in a pub is that Sir John Suckling invented the game in the seventeenth century. A longer, more careful version keeps that credit as a later tradition and points to an older game with a scoring board of its own.

A black-and-white engraving of a long cribbage board with two tracks of holes in blocks of five — A cribbage board, from Hoyle’s Games Modernized (1909), a public-domain line engraving.Photo: “Professor Louis Hoffmann” (Angelo Lewis) and Ernest Bergholt · Public domain · Commons

The game is commonly credited to the 17th-century English poet Sir John Suckling, but it clearly developed from an earlier game called noddy, which also used a special scoring board.⁠¹ The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, following John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, says cribbage was invented by Sir John Suckling (1609–1642), and that the game seems to be an improved form of noddy.⁠²

A related but more complicated game, costly colours, is described by Charles Cotton in The Compleat Gamester (1674).⁠¹

Almost the only big change from the original rules is that, in the United States and in the British two-player domestic game, each player is dealt six cards instead of the original five.⁠¹ Five-card cribbage remains popular in British club and tournament play, commonly as a four-hand partnership game, where five cards is the norm.⁠¹ The 1911 Britannica records that two-handed five-card cribbage was formerly considered the more scientific game, but that this verdict had by then been reversed in favour of the six-card game, in which both hands and the crib contain four cards and 121 holes are scored. In the two-handed five-card game, the non-dealer scores three holes, called “three for last,” which is not part of the six-card game.⁠²

The jack of the starter’s suit — formerly called “knave noddy,” a link with the earlier game — is worth one point to the holder for “his nob,” and is not scored until the showing.⁠¹