The History of Cribbage

Why does a cribbage board turn up in the wardroom of nearly every U.S. Navy submarine? The short answer involves a near-perfect hand, two nights of torpedo runs in the Yellow Sea, and a board that's still being handed down eight decades later.

A poet's card game

Cribbage dates back to the 1630s, credited to the English poet and courtier Sir John Suckling, who developed it out of an older game called noddy. Suckling's version kept noddy's basic idea — scoring combinations of cards — but added the crib and the peg board that give cribbage its name and its distinctive running score. It caught on quickly as a tavern and parlor game, and centuries later is still played roughly the way he set it up.

A sailor's game

Cribbage found a natural home at sea. It plays well in tight quarters, doesn't need a table full of chips or a full deck's worth of players, and a hand can be picked up or set down between duties — all of which made it a natural fit for sailors with long stretches of downtime and not much room to spare. By the time of the Second World War, it had become something close to the unofficial card game of American submarine crews, who spent weeks at a stretch submerged and looking for ways to pass the time between watches.

The Wahoo's lucky hand

The best-known cribbage story from the submarine service comes from USS Wahoo. In April 1943, just before the boat headed into the Yellow Sea on patrol, her commanding officer, Dudley "Mush" Morton, dealt his executive officer, Richard "Dick" O'Kane, a hand worth 29 points — the maximum score any cribbage hand can reach (see exactly how that scores on the scoring page). The crew took it as a good omen. That same night, Wahoo sank two Japanese freighters. A few days later, Morton dealt another standout hand, this one worth 28 points — and over the following two days, the crew sank three more ships.

A board that outlived the boat

O'Kane went on to commanding his own boat, USS Tang, and by most accounts of this tradition, he carried that same cribbage board aboard with him when he took command. From there, the board became something closer to a relic than a game piece: it's said to have been passed down ever since as a standing Pacific Fleet submarine tradition, handed over to whichever submarine is the fleet's oldest still in commission each time its previous holder is decommissioned. Boats that have held it over the years are reported to include USS Kamehameha, USS Parche, USS Los Angeles, and USS Bremerton, with USS Scranton the most recent keeper — meaning, as far as the tradition goes, that same board is likely still sitting in a wardroom somewhere in the Pacific Fleet today.

Still a table game

Outside of naval tradition, cribbage has stayed exactly what it always was: a quick, portable game for two to four players that rewards both careful counting and a bit of nerve. If you're just getting started, the how to play page walks through a full hand from deal to show, and strategy covers what to keep, what to give away, and how to peg without handing your opponent easy points.