Cribbage

A rare combination of a card game and a board game, players advance pegs on a pegboard to race to the end of a track based on rounds of card play.



Invented in the  17th century as a variant of a now largely-forgotten game called "Noddy," Cribbage has become one of the most commonly played games in the English-speaking world. Its ongoing popularity can be largely attributed to the game being easy to learn, inexpensive, and highly portable (a typical board is about half the size of a hardcover book, and the only other item needed is a standard 52-card deck). Cribbage only requires rudimentary arithmetic skills to play, so even children can learn it. The game can  sound difficult to learn, though, because scoring is announced aloud by each player, and its Baroque-era origins have laden it with archaic jargon that sounds to an outsider like the players are speaking in shibboleths and incantations.  note



The most iconic item in the game, the pegboard, is nothing more than a scorekeeping device. Players use a pair of pegs to mark their scores, with the winner being the first to reach 121 points, and some boards also have spaces to mark things like total wins or tournament points. A game can be played with a notepad and pencil instead of a board, but this doesn't happen often as a practical matter. The holes are typically grouped in bunches of five to make counting easy, and scoring also happens rapidly, so it's quicker and easier to simply move the back peg of the pair  X holes beyond the lead peg than it is to constantly rewrite scores on paper, and is less prone to making arithmetical errors.



That said, anyone who can add numbers up to 15, and from there to 31, has the necessary skills to learn to play.