Cribbage Patience or Cribbage Squares

I have recently acquired this version of the game, Cribbage Patience, which I did not know existed in this form.

Like the more familiar Poker Patience set which I have written about at length^[1], it was made in the Court Series produced by Messrs Edward Mortimer, Halifax and London. I have failed to find any further information about this company but speculated elsewhere^[2] that they were linked in some way with Goodall & Son. Sadly, this example does not include the instruction booklet of the kind which all the Poker Patience sets contained, so it is impossible to identify an author, publication date or method of play which would help to answer many of the uncertainties about this game. If anyone has a copy of this document, I would be very pleased indeed to see it!

Above: the red Court Series box for Cribbage Patience.

Above: the Court Series Cribbage Patience board with cards arranged in the five-by-five layout used for Poker Patience.

Incidentally, the miniature playing cards which came with the set were Little Duke “No. 24”; exactly the same as the standard issue with the Poker Patience set.

The cribbage-patience board is identical in size and construction to that for Poker Patience. It is difficult not to conclude, therefore, that the producers of the popular Poker Patience set capitalised on their existing production method to promote a “new” game simply by printing “Cribbage Patience” on the box and the board without attempting to redesign it in any other way. This conclusion is reinforced by the 5 × 5 layout of the board, used for Poker Patience. The earliest description of the Cribbage version of the game I have found (see Dalton below) describes a 4 × 4 structure, as do all subsequent accounts of the game. This is a further reason why I am keen to see a copy of the instructions which were sold as part of the pack.

Origin

I have scoured the early literature to identify when this form of the game was invented and introduced and by whom. The Wikipedia entry for Cribbage Squares states that “The first rules for Cribbage Squares appear around 1950 in America as one of three Cribbage solitaire variants”, attributed to Moyse, 1950^[3]. However, it is clear that the origin of the game is much earlier than that.

R. F. Foster in his Hoyle’s Games, 1897^[4], includes in his list of Cribbage variants one called Cribbage Solitaire. It is immediately clear from reading his description of the game that this is nothing like the cribbage squares game described elsewhere. Indeed, it is difficult to understand how and why Foster’s version of the game is described as solitaire at all as he states: “This game may be played by one person or by several, two to four making an interesting game, either as partners or each for himself”. How the one-person version of the game unfolds is unclear from the description, but there is no reference to a four-by-four square of cards, or indeed a square of any size. This was clearly a different game entirely using the cribbage scoring methods.

Professor Hoffmann, editing his version of “Hoyle’s Games Modernised” (1909)^[5], includes five variants of cribbage (the 5-, 6- and 7-card game plus 3-handed and 4-handed versions) but there is no reference to cribbage solitaire or cribbage squares. Hoffmann at least was unaware of this variant of the game if indeed it existed at all at this point.

However, Basil Dalton’s 1929 edition of his “Games of Patience”^[6] offers a two-page summary of the rules of Cribbage Patience and states: “The game stands to Cribbage much as Poker Patience stands to Poker”. He describes how 16 cards are placed to form a four-by-four table, and how the game proceeds. He outlines the cribbage scoring system in detail, and suggests that the maximum achievable score is 172. This is undoubtedly the form of cribbage patience which in later publications (and currently online) is called Cribbage Squares. It is possible that this game dates from the early 1920s, if not earlier, but I have not yet been able to track down a copy of the first edition of Dalton’s book published in 1924. I know that it was “revised and reprinted” in 1929 and it is possible that Poker Patience was one of the additions then. However, the heyday of Poker Patience appears to have been somewhere between 1909 and 1924 so I strongly suspect that Cribbage Patience was invented and marketed somewhere in the same time period.

Ernest Bergholt in “A New Book of Patience Games”, 1948^[7] writes of “Cribbage Patience (with one whist pack)”: “This game is analogous to the very popular ‘Poker Patience’”. He describes the now familiar four-by-four layout of the cards and how these are to be played. Frustratingly he writes “The inventor of the game thought that 170 was the maximum, but Mr. W. F. Quine has shown how to score 172”. This is hugely frustrating because he does not pause at this point in any of the editions of his book^[8] to say who the inventor of this game was, or indeed, clarify the identity of Mr. Quine^[9]. However, if the inventor of the game thought incorrectly that the maximum score was 170, this error was known by Basil Dalton back in 1924 and so the origin of the game pre-dates this.

I can find no evidence of Cribbage Squares before at least 1911. No such game is included in Lady Cadogan’s “Illustrated Games of Patience”, 1870; Walter Wood’s “The Book of Patience or Cards for a Single Player”, 1887; “Cavendish’s Patience Games”, 1890; Professor Hoffmann’s “The Illustrated Book of Patience Games”, 1891; or Tarbart’s “Patience Games”, 1901.

If anyone was going to pick up this version of patience in these early years it would have been Mary Whitmore Jones, the doyenne of patience books^[10]. She produced at least eight substantial books on the subject, with many of them being reprinted as collections. Collecting Whitmore Jones books is like collecting Bob Dylan albums (which I also do) – in addition to the individual items there is a variety of “Greatest Hits” collections. Her first book “Games of Patience” was published in 1888, followed by further volumes containing new games in 1892, 1898 and 1900. Earlier volumes were reprinted in a single volume in 1905, which she followed with two further volumes of new games in 1905 and 1911. Nowhere in this huge output of well-researched patience games does Cribbage Patience or Cribbage Squares appear.

I must conclude that Cribbage Squares was invented by an as-yet-unknown person between 1911 (the date of Mary Whitmore Jones’ last book) and 1924 when Dalton describes the game in its entirety, complete with the correction of the possible maximum score. Charles Vidor Diehl wrote his first book on Poker Patience in 1908^[11] and it seems more than likely that the inventor of Cribbage Patience was building on the success and popularity of this earlier game soon thereafter. Could it have been Diehl himself? If it was, I can find no published evidence to confirm this. He did not claim to have invented Poker Patience but, when drafting his rules for the game, claimed that “apparently it came out of the East, its absolute place of origin being quite as doubtful as that of Bridge or Poker itself”. It might, however, have been a logical step for the promoter of Poker Patience to have applied the same thinking and design to another common card game, cribbage. This seems by far the most likely explanation.

If anyone has or has seen a copy of the Court Series instruction booklet, or has any further information on cribbage patience, they may be able to solve the mystery and I would be grateful to hear from you.

Footnotes

1. Tony Hall, Poker Patience, WoPC, 2018. ←
2. Ibid. ←
3. Alphonse Moyse, “150 Ways to play Solitaire”, US Playing Card Co., 1950. ←
4. Originally published by Frederick A. Stokes Company, New York, and later published as Hoyle’s Games, Autograph Edition, A. L. Burt Company, New York, 1907, 1913, 1914, 1926 and beyond. ←
5. George Routledge & Son, 1909. ←
6. Basil Dalton, M.A., “Games of Patience: fifty selected games for a single pack”, The Richards Press Ltd, London, 1929. ←
7. Published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London. ←
8. 1948, 1953. ←
9. In fact, Basil Dalton attributes this correction to W. T. Quine but without further explanation. It looks as if Bergholt may have transcribed the second initial incorrectly. ←
10. See Tony Hall, Mary Whitmore Jones and her Chastleton Patience Board, WoPC, 2020. ←
11. Poker Patience & Progressive Poker Patience, Advance Publishing Company, London, 1908. ←