Game 2: Scribbage

This card game is based on the scoring (of the hand) for Cribbage.  It's a game for 2 to 4 players with one player or team scoring the points in the rows and the other player or team scoring the points in the columns.  It involves a good combination of chance and strategy and also of having to choose  between offense and defense with each card placement.

OK, so I said the idea behind this blog was that of playing through all our games.  I guess this post feels a bit like cheating, since more than 5000 games can be played with one deck of cards, therefore this whole blog could be taken up with merely multitudes of games from one deck of cards.  On the other hand, we have dozens of decks of standard playing cards around the house (see below for one such cluster), and therefore to not include any such games would be leaving out much of what constitutes gaming for us.  So I'll take a middle road and only include a handful of favorites.

 The two-player game begins with the dealer shuffling and dealing 12 cards, face-down, to each player.  These dealt cards are left in a single stack, face down, in front of each player; in other words, you can't look ahead at upcoming cards.  The remainder of the deck is placed in the center of the playing area, and the top card is turned face-up.  This card become the center of the 5x5 grid.  On each turn the player looks at the top card of his deck and places his card on any empty space within the grid.  The round ends when the last card is played.  Each player determines his score (either in the five columns or the five rows) by counting points as in Cribbage - 2 points for each pair, 5 points for a flush, 2 points for each combination of cards that adds to 15, n points for an n-card run, etc., etc., etc.  It's a quick game, and can be played to as many or as few rounds as desired.  If you know how to play Cribbage, you know how to play Scribbage!