Output Stream of Consciousness

Link: http://cribwars.com

My wife and I gave her parents the game Crib Wars for Christmas, and I got to see it in action yesterday.

You can play regular crib on the board if you so care to. There's a spot marked "121" for the number of regular holes in the path.

What's the fun in that, though? In Crib Wars, you have cruel penalty boxes (knock you out for three whole hands), time traps (if you land within blue-bordered holes, you must go backwards along the blue route before you can go forward again), skipping areas that jump you forward, and advancement tracks which put you down a path that lets you skip whole sections.

You need to be a pretty strategic player for this. Simply being a good crib player isn't enough, since it's very hard to skip the time trap squares when you're pegging*. Of course, you have to be careful with your strategy when counting your hand(s) as well. It's easy to get overjoyed with a hand of 24 and land on the worst spot possible (exactly as happened to my wife yesterday)

(*For those not in the know with crib, when you're going around the table, dealing out cards so that things total up to 15, or 31, or getting last card, or making a pair or a straight with the last cards shown, you usually advance by one or two holes at a time. This is called 'pegging', and it's definitely dangerous in crib wars to be just in front of something bad while you're pegging)

It's a fun variant of crib, but prepare for a lot of frustration until you get the strategy down. Dena's mom went through one time trap four times before finally managing to skip it.