Section 6: Variants & House Rules
The ACC rules above govern sanctioned tournament play. Other forms of cribbage vary, and the differences are worth naming because they change the game materially:
- Three- and four-handed cribbage: played with essentially the same rules as the standard two-player game (Rule 1.2).
- Doubles: ACC rules that apply to singles events generally apply to doubles as well, with additional guidance for team seating and rotation systems — round-robin charts, captain-based rotation, or "winners stay, losers move" — and a requirement that all cribbage boards keep the same orientation throughout a tournament (Appendix B).
- Five-card cribbage: the older English game, played to 61 with a different discard count — not the ACC tournament form and not addressed by these rules.
- Casual scoring: informal games often ignore skunk, stink-hole, and dead-hole conventions entirely, though all are defined terms in the ACC rules (Rule 1.6).
- Situations not covered by these rules are left to the head judge's final decision for that tournament, who may impose a penalty of up to two points per infraction, sparingly, for persistent violations (Rule 14.1).