When I was ten I could take three boards in ten off my grandfather.
He had decades of cribbage on me. I was ten. If cribbage were mostly skill, my number should have been zero, and we both knew it. The cards get a vote, and some nights the cards have the loudest voice at the table.
That has bugged me the whole time I have been building Double Skunk. The game already has modes that make cribbage stranger on purpose, and I will get to those. This post is about the opposite urge. I wanted a mode that could say player A outplayed player B and actually mean it.
The idea I took to Reddit
The version in my head worked like a mirror. Whatever hands the deal gives you, it eventually gives your rival, and whatever it gives them, it eventually gives you. Both of you play both sides of every deal. If the deck hands out garbage, it hands out the same garbage twice.
I could build that. Double Skunk seeds its deck states, so lining up mirrored deals is bookkeeping, not magic. What I could not do was convince myself the design held together, so I wrote it up and posted it to r/Cribbage to see what people who have played this game their whole lives thought of it.
The pushback was immediate, and it was good. One commenter went straight at the mechanics. A race to 121 ends whenever it ends, so how do you ever guarantee the mirror completes? Another said cribbage was already close to a perfect game and did not need reinventing. Fair. I love the game as it is. I also remember being ten.
It already had a name
Then a commenter said the thing that reframed the whole thread. Duplicate cribbage is a thing. It borrows its shape from duplicate bridge tournaments, where identical hands are dealt at every table and your standing comes from how you played the same cards everybody else played.
The format even solves the problem the first commenter had nailed. Duplicate play is not a race to 121. You play a set number of hands and keep a tally, so the mirror always completes, because the match does not end until every deal has been played from both chairs.
I had spent weeks circling an idea that bridge players settled generations ago. Googling it felt like walking into a room where the argument I was having with myself had been over for a century.
Then the homework arrived
The same commenter followed up with a warning I did not expect. Make sure you don’t violate any patents. And then three patent numbers, dropped into the thread like it was nothing.
The oldest one is my favorite. US793489A is a card receptacle for duplicate cribbage, filed in 1903 and granted in 1905. It is a wooden tray with rows of slots, built to carry the same dealt hands from table to table without mixing them up. Every claim in it covers the physical box. It expired in 1922, which puts it in the public domain for over a century, and it means people were building furniture for this game mode while Teddy Roosevelt was president.
So no, I did not invent duplicate cribbage. I missed it by about 120 years.
The other two looked more serious on paper. US7207563B2 claims a live tournament process for removing chance from games of skill, with groups of players rotating through parallel games on identical deals. It lapsed in 2015 when the maintenance fees went unpaid. US7422521B2 claims a method for measuring skill in a tournament setting, and it expired in December of last year. I put a research agent on all three the same night, then read the claims myself. Expired, lapsed, and expired, and none of them describes a video game feature in the first place. I am not a patent lawyer, but a stack of dead patents behind a 1905 paper trail is about as clean as this gets. The old tray even helps. It is prior art with the words duplicate cribbage printed right on it.
A stranger handed me the name for my mode and the legal homework in the same thread. That is the part of building in public nobody tells you about. Sometimes it just works.
Both sides of every deal
Here is what duplicate cribbage looks like in Double Skunk.
A duplicate match runs a set number of hands and keeps a running tally. There is no race to 121, so the board lost its finish line. It is a loop now. You peg around it and keep going, and every lap past the marker pays out. The reward tiles still live on the track, so if you are playing with the full game on top, powerups, consumables, deck markings, gold, all of it still triggers as your peg crosses it.
Underneath, the deals are mirrored. The hand you pick up early in the match turns up in your rival’s hand later, and theirs turn up in yours, offset so the two halves of a deal never land back to back. By the end both players have sat in both chairs of every deal. Add it all up and the deck has given each of you exactly the same cards. The tally difference is the part you did with them.
That retires the oldest complaint in cribbage. Nobody got dealt nothing all night, because every hand you cursed, your rival had to untangle too. What is left to argue about is the discard, the pegging, and the counting, which is to say the game.
I will be honest about the limits. The same six cards do not play identically from both chairs, because the score and the pegging around them will have drifted by the time the mirror comes back around. Duplicate play narrows luck, it does not delete it. But it moves the answer to who played better from a shrug to a number, and I have wanted that number since I was ten.
And the meta layer is a choice, not a tax. Run duplicate clean and it is the purest cribbage Double Skunk offers. Run it with the full deck of nonsense on top and the nonsense is at least dealt fairly.
I cannot see the seams
My big worry going into that thread was that sharp players would document hands and recognize the mirror. Spot the repeat, remember how it played, squeeze out an edge.
Then I played it. I built the mirroring. I know it is there and I know roughly where to look, and thirty hands into a session I still cannot point at a single deal and say that one, that was mine. More than once while building this game I have stopped to hunt for a bug in hand generation because two deals felt identical. They were not. Cribbage hands rhyme, constantly, and a true repeat disappears into a crowd of near repeats.
And suppose you do catch one. You now know six cards your rival might be holding and how you played them last time. That is worth a pegging read, maybe two. If you earned it by memorizing deals across half an hour of cribbage, take it. You are exactly the player this mode was built for. The campaign rivals will not catch you doing it, either. They do not notice the mirror at all, because I have not taught them to notice.
The rest of the shelf
Duplicate is the serious tool, but it sits on a shelf of modes built for the opposite job, keeping a long run from going stale.
Muggins mode makes you claim your own points. The game asks what your hand is worth, multiple choice, and if you get it wrong your rival gets a chance to answer and take what you missed. I love it beyond reason. I nearly called the whole game Petty Math because of it.
Reverse cribbage flips the goal. Low score wins, and it is so much harder than it sounds. Every instinct you have spent years sharpening points the wrong way. I picked it up lurking the same subreddit, and I will not pretend it is a nightly game, but as a palate cleanser in the middle of a long run it earns its slot.
The chess clock does what a chess clock does. Think fast or bleed points.
Those modes add spice. Duplicate removes noise. It took me a while to see that those are different jobs, and that the shelf needs both.
Cheers
One thread gave this mode its name, its scoring format, its legal due diligence, and a couple of arguments I needed to hear. That is a lot of design work to get from strangers for free, and the game is plainly better for it. So thank you, r/Cribbage. Consider this post the tip jar.
If you try duplicate mode and you can see the seams, write to me and tell me which hands. I looked. I could not.
Double Skunk is in development, built by one person figuring it out as he goes. If a version of cribbage where nobody gets to blame the cards sounds like your kind of fight, join the playtest or wishlist it on Steam. The patch notes track what changes build to build.
