Six cards each, four kept, two thrown to the dealer's crib, and a race to a hundred and twenty-one. Cribbage is a scoring game more than a card game, which is exactly where most implementations go wrong.
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You are each dealt six and keep four; the two you discard go into the crib, which the dealer counts as an extra hand. A card is cut to start. Then comes the play, where you alternate cards and score for pairs, runs and reaching fifteen or thirty-one, and after that the show, where both hands and the crib are counted properly.
First past a hundred and twenty-one wins, twice round the board.
| Cards dealt to each player | 6 |
|---|---|
| Cards kept | 4 |
| Cards to the crib | 2 each |
| Target score | 121 |
The obvious way to build the play phase is to alternate turns, one card each. It is also wrong, and wrong in a way you would never notice from the screen.
When a player cannot lay a card without passing thirty-one they say go, and their opponent then keeps playing, consecutively, until they are stuck too. So the turn does not reliably pass across the table, and pairs and runs have to be counted against the cards laid since the last reset rather than against whose turn it is. Model it as alternating turns and you get a game that looks entirely normal and pegs incorrectly.
We built the play phase as segments rather than turns for exactly this reason, and the order the hands are counted in is treated as load-bearing rather than cosmetic, because at the end of a close game it decides who got there first.
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