Cribbage JD

I’ll preface that this review with the fact that this review is based on comparing to how cards are shuffled and drawn in real life gameplay. This is the second cribbage app I’ve gotten and I come to the same issue. The actual gameplay and functionality is fine, but the luck of the draw more often than not goes far in your favor or far against you from round to round. I’ll play a round and players with 2 points flop a card that gives them 16 or they’ll start with 6-7-7-8. Which happens, but in this app it happens in back to back to back hands for one player and the “luck” shifts to either me skunking someone or getting skunked. Previous app developer told me how random their cards are, so I guess don’t take my word, play a few rounds in real life and compare them to a few rounds here and see for yourself. A bit frustrating. Will keep searching for an app that compares to a real life shuffle. Update: decided to uninstall. The amount of 14-20 point hands in a single round is getting worse as my level increases somehow. Again, some in my favor, some not.

Overall, I like this game as it has a good design and relatively quick pace. A few issues have knocked it down a few stars for me. 1) The game force wait time with ‘Go’. I don’t need to wait a couple seconds for it to happen. Also make it more noticeable on screen. 2) Playing online against people, I never want to play with their chosen board. Some are ok, but others are difficult to see. I’d like an option to only play with the board of my choice for my screen. 3) Card distribution. Over the course of thousands of hands, it will balance out but on a game by game or hand by hand basis, it’s laughable. There’s something off with the array shuffle algorithm or the random seed. Statistically, too many 3/4 of a kind and 5/6 card straights dealt in hands each game to be realistic. Looking at Cribbage hand distribution charts shows it’s just not going to happen every other game like this. The point at which I stopped taking it seriously was playing online and someone had 3 straight 20+ point hands (excluding peg/crib).

I only play the computer. The randomness of the cards seems much much better than the other free cribbage app I was using. After playing a few hundred times this past year I’ve decided the hands do not repeat to any annoying degree as was the case on the other app. That said, I still detect a predictability somewhere in this game. In hands where you must make the choice between being conservative/defensive or more daring/hopeful as to cards put into opponent’s crib, being daring plays into what seems (too often) to be a setup for the opponent getting ahead. By saying “setup”, I am imagining there is a bias in the program that punishes risky crib contributions. 5 point crib flush has never happened either for or against, which is unnatural in my estimation, so I’ve learned to ignore the possible outcome from a same suit crib contribution. Conservative solid play is how to get ahead in the stats with this cribbage app. It’s teaching good habits.