Some More Cribbage Boards

The Cribbage Board collection I'm definitely not collecting continues to grow! In my defence they do mostly all get used, and like the small collection of Shove Ha'penny Boards which I'm also not collecting, it' nice to have a choice to hand.

I found this old Bakelite and Brass Cribbage Board at a car boot sale recently. It cost little more than the price of a pint. Tarnished and stained from many years of neglect, I felt it was worth rescuing and giving a bit of a polish up. It's interesting that something as basic, functional, and downright common as a cribbage board would be this over-engineered. The precision drilled brass plate has been nicely chamfered to fit the Bakelite base before being firmly fixed with six matching brass screws. Deep machined holes at each end of the main body provide storage for the two sets of neat colour coded Brass Pegs, each hole neatly plugged by its own brass screw-in cap. This is a really posh cribbage board, perhaps made as a one-off project by a skilled craftsman, or maybe crib boards of this quality were once available to buy from upmarket stores, a scoring board for the gamer who had everything.

Cribbage Pegs. Ox Bone to the left, colour-coded plastic to the right. It's not absolutely essential to have proper pegs for a crib board, un-popped rivets and matchsticks do the job just as well, but if you're going to use an attractive old Mahogany board like this one it seems a shame not to embellish it with an equally elegant set of pegs. The board is clearly a homemade one, but has a nicely worked compartment underneath for storing the pegs. The holes on the base would have originally housed a set of brass bun feet.

Cribbage Boards, Dominoes, and Cards at the Green Dragon, Ryhall, Rutland