Printable Cribbage Score Sheet

Cribbage is normally scored with a physical board and pegs, but not every table has one handy, and a paper or on-screen tracker works exactly as well once you understand what the board is actually counting. This page explains the numbers behind the sheet, then gives you the printable layout itself.

What a cribbage score sheet actually needs to track

A cribbage board has two rows of 60 holes per player plus a "game" hole at 121 — but all a paper sheet really needs is a single running total per player, from 0 to 121, updated after every scoring event during a hand. The events, in the order they happen:

1. "His heels" — 2 points to the dealer immediately if the starter card is a Jack.
2. The play (pegging) — points scored during the turn-by-turn card play, for 15s, 31s, pairs, runs, and "go."
3. The show — each player's hand is scored (non-dealer first, then dealer), followed by the dealer's crib.

A clean sheet tracks a running total per player across all three phases, with space to jot down each hand's sub-total so a scoring dispute can be traced back to exactly which phase produced the disputed points.

Reading the sheet correctly

Because cribbage scoring happens continuously through a hand rather than in one lump sum, the most common sheet mistake is losing track of whether a point was already pegged during the play before the show begins. The fix: record pegging points the moment they happen, in a separate column from the hand-count column, so nothing gets double-counted or missed when the hand is finally shown and scored.

Print-ready layout

The printable sheet below uses one row per hand and three columns per player — pegging points, hand/crib points, and a running total — so a full game (typically 10-15 hands to 121) fits comfortably on a single printed page. It's designed to sit flat next to the board or stand in for one entirely.

(The interactive on-screen version of this sheet, with automatic running totals, is available at the Cribbage Scorekeeper tool — this page's printable layout is the same numbers, on paper.)

Common tracking mistakes on a paper sheet

The most frequent sheet error isn't a scoring mistake at all — it's writing down a hand's total in the wrong phase's column, which makes the running total technically correct but the phase-by-phase breakdown wrong, so nobody can tell afterward where a disputed point actually came from. A close second: forgetting that "his heels" (2 points for a Jack starter) belongs to the pegging phase and happens before a single card is played, which means it needs its own line rather than getting folded into the first pegging entry of the hand. Writing the running total in pencil, and updating it the moment each phase finishes rather than waiting until the whole hand is done, avoids both of these.

How a running total catches a scoring dispute early

Because cribbage scores continuously across three phases per hand, a sheet that records a sub-total for each phase (rather than only the final running total) makes it possible to isolate exactly where a disputed point came from — "were fifteens double-counted in the show, or was there a pegging point missed during the play" — without re-playing the entire hand from memory. This is the same reasoning tournament directors use when a running paper backup is kept alongside a physical board: the board shows where you are, but only the sheet shows how you got there.

Quick answer key while you're scoring

• His heels: 2 points, dealer only, only if the cut/starter card is a Jack.
• Fifteens: 2 points per distinct combination summing to exactly 15.
• Pairs: 2 points per pair; three of a kind is 6 points (all three pairings); four of a kind is 12 points (all six pairings).
• Runs: points equal to the run's length; a duplicated rank inside a run can make it count more than once.
• Flush: 4 points for a hand flush (all four hand cards one suit), 5 if the starter matches too; the crib requires the starter to match or it scores 0.
• His nobs: 1 point for holding the Jack matching the starter's suit.

For the full explanation of each of these, including worked examples, see the scoring deep-dive. For the base rules of dealing, the crib, and the play itself, see the full cribbage rules.