Absolutely perfect way to score cribbage without a board
I’m not sure why this cribbage board counter doesn’t get more love. Maybe because Apple search has it buried 6 pages deep, below that has nothing to do with cribbage? Perhaps.
But we’d been looking for a way to score cribbage games without hauling a giant hunk of wood around. While cool, it’s a bit high maintenance.
I downloaded 5 other counters and they all sucked for various reasons. Some were “new agey”, some were “retro”, others “high fidelity”, but all sucked at actually keeping score without constantly fumbling and subsequently fragging everything up.
So while this app may not be “pretty”, it is pretty danged good at doing its job.
It tracks scores in a logical manner.
It’s extremely easy to score points.
Keeps an ongoing history of scores (something none of the others do).
Keeps track of what kind of scoring was done, per player: count, hand, crib (yet another thing none of the others do).
Let’s you very easily and cleanly correct errors in scoring, after the fact—and tracks having done so in the log!
Lets you name the players (like how hard is that, “fancy” other counters??).
Lets you setup up to 5 players (although I’ve never seen cribbage played with that many players).
It keeps an ongoing record of games and who won, by date.
It does a bunch of clever other things that you don’t even realize till you’re using it.
Best of all, it’s entirely free and without ads!!!
This cribbage counter is a solid winner, hands down!
Overall this is a legitimate 9 out the 10.
The extra point might be earned with some minor eye candy added.
So, if anyone is actually still reading this, here are a couple of suggestions—if the dev hasn’t given up on this.
The counter cleverly switches from crib back to pegging. Awesome! Would be double awesome if it also did so going from hand to crib. The game knows how many players are playing, and when it reaches that number of players scoring hands, it could switch to crib automatically.
It would be cool to add *some* eye candy by incorporating a wooden board (tiny and non interactive), that just showed the score with pegs. Maybe wrap the graphics around the number score and make their overall size a bit smaller. I would definitely NOT want the peg board to be interactive. From experience with other counters that is extremely cumbersome and annoying.
For the score buttons, having the -1 is an interesting choice. I would think +1 +2 +5 would do the same without the weirdness of -1, but I do get it if one makes a mistake and wants to correct it before submit.
While I like the way the scoring process is done, complete with a confirmation click for submit, I think it might be cleaner to have just one set of buttons with the scores (instead of a group of buttons per player), and another set of buttons for peg, hand, crib (maybe single cyclic button that changes on press?) and one for the player scoring (maybe a radio button with P1, P2, etc).
These are rough ideas, and definitely not a requirement, but might give the UI a crisper more “modern” look.