Cribbage Scorekeeper

Cribbage scores in a way most card games don't: twice per hand rather than once, with a running count that has to hit exactly 121 to end the game, and a dealer's crib that swaps sides every single hand. A plain tally sheet built for a simple running total handles all three of those poorly. This tool is built around cribbage's actual shape instead of a generic scoring grid.

Two counting phases, tracked as two separate entries

Cribbage scores during pegging — as cards are played and specific combinations (fifteens, pairs, runs, the go) come up in the moment — and again afterward when each hand and the crib are counted in full. Entering these as two distinct events per round, rather than one combined number, lets a disagreement get traced back to the specific phase it actually came from, instead of re-adding an entire hand's worth of scoring from scratch to find where two numbers diverged.

The crib swaps dealer every hand, and the tool tracks whose turn it is

Because the crib belongs to whoever's dealing, and the deal rotates every hand, it's easy to lose track of whose extra hand is being counted on a given round — especially several hands into a long game. The tool keeps the dealer rotation visible alongside the score, so "whose crib is this" never has to be reconstructed from memory partway through counting.

The running total is what actually decides the game — not the peg position

On a physical board, the two-peg system (a back peg and a front peg, leapfrogging forward with each new count) does double duty: it shows the current score and, as a side effect, the size of the last count. This tool represents the same information differently, since a screen doesn't need a physical trick to show both — it keeps a running total per player alongside a log of each round's individual points, so the same two things a peg board shows (where you are, and how you got there) are both always visible without anyone needing to eyeball a gap between two pegs.

Correcting a miscounted hand doesn't mean starting over

Because pegging and hand-counting are entered as separate line items rather than folded into one running figure, fixing a miscounted hand is a matter of editing that one entry — every later total recalculates automatically from there. This matters more in cribbage than in most games, because a single hand can carry a dozen small combinations, and a table that catches a mistake two hands later shouldn't have to reconstruct the entire game to fix it.

What it won't catch for you

This tool totals whatever count you enter — it doesn't verify that a hand was actually scored correctly under cribbage's own combination rules, and it has no way to know whether a player missed points they were entitled to claim. That's a genuine limitation worth knowing before relying on it during a competitive game: it's an accurate running-total tracker, not a hand auditor. For the actual scoring combinations — what a fifteen, a run, or "his nobs" is actually worth — see cribbage's full scoring breakdown, and for the specific disagreements that come up most often around counting, see cribbage's dispute page.

Why cribbage gets its own tool instead of using the general one

Most games on this site score with one simple running number per round, which the universal scorekeeper already handles cleanly. Cribbage's two-phase counting and the 121-point finish line are structured enough, and different enough from a generic running total, to be worth a dedicated tool rather than forcing the general one to represent something it wasn't built for. If the table isn't playing cribbage specifically, the universal scorekeeper is almost always the better fit.

Where the shape of this tool actually comes from

The two-peg, twice-around-the-board design of a physical cribbage board isn't decoration — it's a four-hundred-year-old solution to exactly the counting problem this tool solves digitally. The full story of why the physical board looks the way it does, including the 121-point finish line and the skunk-line markings partway down the track, is covered separately in why the cribbage board looks the way it does.

Does this tool handle three- or four-player cribbage, or just the standard two-player game? The scoring logic — running total, per-round entries, dealer rotation — works the same regardless of player count; three- and four-player cribbage just adds more players sharing the same structure, not a different one.

What happens if I close the browser mid-game? Like the other scorekeepers on this site, the running total and round history are saved to your device as you go, so closing the tab or locking your phone doesn't erase a game in progress.