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We're close now. The build is done, it's in Steam's hands for review, and release is right around the corner. So while I wait, I want to tell you about the feature I built the whole game around. Not the coaching, not the tutorials. The one that answers the oldest complaint in digital cribbage. Every card game you've played against a computer eventually makes you think it: this thing is cheating. It always seems to cut the Jack. It always has the card it needs. Whether it's actually peeking at your hand or you just hit a rough run of variance, you can never really know. And not knowing quietly poisons the whole thing. You stop trusting the game, and a card game you don't trust isn't worth playing. I've played cribbage my whole life, and that suspicion is exactly why I could never settle on most of the cribbage apps that are out there. So when I set out to build Just Cribbage, I didn't want to promise the AI plays fair. I wanted to prove it.
Before a card hits the table, the game commits to the entire deal. It writes down a cryptographic fingerprint of the shuffled deck before you've seen your hand. The Alley, which is what I call the AI opponent, plays only from the cards it was dealt. It never sees your hand. It never sees the undealt stock. It gets what a human across the table would get: its own six cards, and whatever you choose to show it. Then, after the hand is over, you can pull up the receipt. That isn't a figure of speech. There's a verifier built into the game that takes the deal you just played and checks it against the fingerprint that was committed before you saw your cards. If they match, and they always will, you have proof the deck was set before the first card moved. No hindsight, no reshuffling to save the AI, no card waiting up its sleeve for the cut. When the Alley beats you, and on the higher difficulties it will, it beat you fair. You don't have to take my word for it. You can check.
This is the part I just finished, and it's why I wanted to write this up now. The same system that proves your deals were fair is now running on the leaderboards. Every daily deal leaderboard entry carries a full replay receipt. See a score above yours that looks impossible? Press the watch button on that row and the whole match plays out in front of you, hand by hand. Every discard, every peg, every count. And because that replay comes from the same committed record, you aren't watching a re-enactment. You're watching the deal that was proven fair, played out exactly as it happened. It does more than settle arguments. When a score gets submitted, the server doesn't just trust the number. It re-simulates the whole match from the committed record and confirms the score is real before it's allowed to stand. A cribbage leaderboard is only worth as much as your confidence that everyone on it earned their spot, so I made that confidence something the system checks rather than something you have to hope for. Getting the replays live took longer than it should have, for a reason only a fellow developer will enjoy. Steam hands back its file receipt handles as unsigned 64-bit numbers, and the way they were being read, every real handle came through as a negative value, which the code treated as "no receipt exists." So the watch button was hiding on exactly the entries that had a receipt to show. Two stacked bugs like that, found and fixed live against the real boards. Now all three of yesterday's daily entries show the button, and their receipts download and play back cleanly.
Everything I just described, you can verify without owning Just Cribbage at all. The website runs the same verifier right on the page. Paste a match receipt and it reproduces the exact deal from the committed seed using nothing but SHA-256, straight in your browser. It works offline, it has no dependencies, and it runs a self-test on a known deal first, so you can confirm the checker itself is honest before you trust a word it prints. If the cards it shows match the cards you were dealt, no board was re-rolled or stacked in the Alley's favor. And if you want to know exactly how the Alley thinks, that's on the site too. There's a full AI deep dive that opens up the whole brain: how it scores every possible discard across all 46 cuts, how the difficulty tiers actually differ from one another, how it reads the threat you pose during the pegging, and how the cryptographic dealing is wired from commit to reveal. No hand-waving about "advanced algorithms." The real logic, laid out section by section, for anyone who cares to read it. Check a deal yourself:just-cribbage.web.app/verify.html How the AI thinks:just-cribbage.web.app/ai
Cribbage is a hidden-information game. You can't see the Alley's hand, it can't see yours, and the crib sits face down until the end. Games like that live or die on trust, because the moment you suspect the other side is looking at your cards, every loss feels stolen and every win feels hollow. Most digital adaptations answer the cheating accusation with a shrug and a "trust me." I wanted the other answer. Skill should be the only thing that decides a hand of cribbage, and in this one, you can prove that it was. Just Cribbage releases August 3rd at $6.99, as soon as it clears Steam review. If a cribbage game you can actually trust sounds like your kind of thing, adding it to your wishlist helps a solo dev more than you'd think. It's the single biggest signal Steam pays attention to. And if you've ever been burned by an AI you were sure was cheating, tell me about it in the comments. I built this whole system because of that feeling, and I'd like to hear I'm not the only one. Wishlist Just Cribbage on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/4954470/Just_Cribbage
That gap has bugged me for years. I've played cribbage my whole life, and the way you actually get better at this game is the way I learned: an older player watching over your shoulder, wincing when you toss a five into their crib, and telling you afterward what you should have seen. When I set out to build Just Cribbage, I wanted that person in the game. Not a popup that says "wrong," but a coach.
So the coaching suite became one of the biggest systems in the game, and honestly the one I'm proudest of. Some of these tools I've never seen in another cribbage game anywhere. Here's the tour.
Two principles shaped everything, and I think they matter more than any single feature.
The coach never holds you to a standard the AI won't play to itself. Every grade routes through the exact same brain the computer opponent uses. When the coach says a different throw was better, that's the same math the top-tier AI would use to make that throw. No hindsight oracle, no peeking at hidden cards. If the coach calls your pegging play second best, it means best under a fair count of what could be out there, which is the only honest standard in a game of hidden information.
And every piece of it is optional. Each tool has its own switch, the whole thing goes silent in the Daily Deal and online play, and the handful of tools that help you before you commit a play mark the game as assisted so it never touches a leaderboard. If you want a pure, quiet game of cribbage, that's one toggle away. It's in the name of the game, after all.
A slim strip near the board gives you the reads a seasoned player carries in their head. Your pace against par, using the rule of 26. Whether the board says attack or defend. On fourth street, the arithmetic that decides close games: how many holes you need, how many they need, and who counts first. There's even a win odds pill, built from 1,400 games of the engine playing itself, so "I'm five points behind" becomes "I win this from here about 38% of the time."
None of that reads your cards. It's all information a physical board already shows, which is exactly why most of us never learned to use it. I haven't seen another cribbage game teach board position at all, and it's the part of the game that separates casual players from the ones who beat you at the pub.
Throw two cards to the crib and the coach grades the toss against every possible keep, computed exactly across all 46 possible cuts. Play a card in the pegging and it gets graded too, and here's the part I care about: it leads with reasons, not decimals. "That leaves the count on 21, and any ten-card burns you" teaches something. A raw number doesn't.
The pegging coach also knows about traps. The five-card trap, pair-royal bait, the magic eleven. When you spring one, it celebrates by name. When you held one and never sprang it, it tells you afterward. Pegging is the least-coached skill in cribbage software by a mile, and trap play is the least coached part of pegging. As far as I can tell, nothing else out there touches it.
After the Show, a recap band tells you what the best throw would have scored against the actual cut. Sometimes your "mistake" would have scored worse, because cribbage is a game of odds and the card that flipped didn't cooperate. The coach says so plainly. Learning the difference between a good decision and a good outcome is half of getting better at this game.
Chess apps figured out that one "review my game" button changes how people improve, so cribbage gets one too. Game Review lays out the whole match hand by hand and pulls out the two or three moments that actually swung it, with your win odds before and after each one. You can ask what the top-tier AI would have thrown with your exact cards, and see where a sharp card-reader could have inferred what your opponent was holding from their plays alone.
The suite also remembers you, which is the part that makes it a coach instead of a commentator. It quietly tracks your tendencies across recent games and shows your recurring leaks: maybe you keep feeding fives to their crib, or leave dangerous counts in the pegging. Each leak links to the lesson in the built-in academy that fixes it. And your real blunders become practice material. Mistake Drills replays your own worst discards back to you, same six cards, same crib, until you find the throw you missed. No puzzle pack ever hits as hard as your own games do.
The coach even knows when to shut up. Turn on focused coaching and it retires flags for mistakes you've stopped making, tells you so ("you haven't fed a five in 30 deals"), and saves its voice for the leak you're actually working on.
Cribbage has carried people through 400 years of kitchen tables, and most of us plateau early because nobody ever showed us the next layer. I built this suite for the player who suspects there's more to the game than luck and wants to find it. If that's you, I'd love to have you.
Just Cribbage releases August 3rd at $6.99. If any of this sounds like your kind of game, a wishlist genuinely helps a solo dev more than you'd think. And if there's something you wish a cribbage coach would teach you, tell me in the comments. I'm still building, and the best ideas keep going in.
Cribbage has a problem, and it's not the game itself. It's the vocabulary. Tell a new player there's a "crib," a "pone," a "starter," and something called "His Nobs," and watch their eyes glaze over before you've even dealt a card. I've been playing my whole life, so half of that sounds normal to me. But every time I handed a friend a board and said "okay, so first the crib," I watched the same thing happen. They nodded, got lost by turn three, and never came back to it.
So a big chunk of the work on Just Cribbage went into two teaching systems, and I wanted to actually talk about them instead of just listing "tutorial included!" in a feature bullet somewhere.
The basic tutorial: one real hand, start to finish
The main tutorial isn't a wall of rules up front. It's six short chapters that walk through a single hand of cribbage from the deal to the final count, in order, so you learn each piece exactly when it becomes relevant (you can also hover over cribbage-specific terms that are unfamiliar). You learn what fifteens and pairs are worth right before you're asked to spot one. You learn what the crib is right before you have to decide what to throw into it. By the time you reach the pegging phase, you're not memorizing a rulebook, you're just finishing the hand you started.
It's not a slideshow either. You actually play the drills. There's a step where you have to pick the two cards to feed your own crib, and a separate one where your opponent dealt and you have to starve theirs instead, because those are two completely different decisions with the same six cards in your hand. Later you're tapping the card that lands the count on fifteen, or pairing an opponent's card for two, or learning when to just say "Go" and hand over a point instead of panicking about it.
The whole thing ends with something the entire cribbage world dreams of: it walks you through building the best possible hand in cribbage, the 29. Three fives, a matching Jack, and the fourth five turning up as the cut card. By the end of the tutorial you've counted a 29 yourself, even though the odds of it happening for real are something like 1 in 216,580 hands. Consider it a taste of what you're chasing every time you pick up the cards afterward.
The Advanced Academy: for players who already know the rules
Knowing how to play cribbage and knowing how to play it well are two very different things, so there's a second, separate track for that. I heard somewhere the phrase: "Cribbage is 2/3 luck and 1/3 skill," and that's always stuck with me - and I honestly think it's true. So the advanced academy is 17 lessons across discarding, board position, pegging, reading your opponent, and the endgame, and none of it is folklore. Every claim in there is backed by actual math from this game's own simulation engine, not just "trust me, five card discards are good."
A few examples of what's actually in it. There's a full breakdown of the Rule of Twenty-Six, the classic tournament shorthand for pacing yourself against the board (dealer averages about 16 points a hand, non-dealer about 10, so every two hands should move your peg about 26 holes). There's a lesson on exactly how good or bad a discard really is, because I ran the numbers on every possible two-card throw into the crib and it turns out a pair of fives averages almost 9 points while a ten and a King average about 3.4. There's a lesson on baiting your opponent into a pair so you can slam down the third one for six points back, and one on reading what your opponent's plays are quietly telling you about the cards still in their hand.
It's built the same way as the basic tutorial: narrated, with matching on-screen text, a Replay button on every step, and a quick question at the end of each lesson so it isn't just passive listening. There's also a searchable glossary sitting behind it the whole time, so if a lesson name-drops "muggins" or "the stink hole" and you blank on what that means, you can look it up without leaving the screen.
And if you already know all this
None of it is mandatory. Every piece of the coaching and tutorial system has its own on/off switch, right down to individual hint types, so if you've been playing since you were a kid and just want a clean board and an opponent that doesn't cheat, you can turn the training wheels off completely and never see them again.
I'd rather build the on-ramp than assume everyone already knows how to drive. If you've got a minute, I'd genuinely like to hear what part of learning cribbage confused you the most when you were starting out. It's still shaping what's in there.
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This page aggregates Steam news feeds, patch notes, and developer announcements for Just Cribbage, sourced from official Steam community posts.
Major updates, balance changes, and seasonal events often correlate with player-count spikes — cross-reference announcements here with the live charts on the main Just Cribbage statistics page.
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