Trivial Cribbage Premium for iPhone
Cribbage was the perfect game for the pre-iPhone era. It’s a card game with pegs, which makes it not super-graphics-intensive, it requires a pretty simple mathematical formula for a decent AI, and it doesn’t require too many controls: tap, swipe, drag. So what if you don’t want to play Hero of Sparta or The Sims? What if you want to sit back and play a nice, simple game of cribbage?
You can. But, at least with Trivial Cribbage, it does feel like you’re playing on a dumber phone.
First, the basics. Trivial Cribbage looks and acts like a spiral cribbage board. You are dealt a hand of six cards, discarding two into the crib, and playing your remaining cards against the AI. For those of you who haven’t played Cribbage, it’s not unfun: you try to combine your hand into combinations of fifteen and runs of three or four cards. You play a hand against the AI and then count up the combination of cards in your hand. The game comes with a tutorial, so even novice players can get up and running quickly. It’s a good, strategic, card game with tons of replayability, and Trivial does a nice job of the basics: gameplay is crisp, the cards are nicely animated, and it’s pretty easy to tell who’s winning and losing. The advanced features allow you to count your own points and mug (steal) points from your opponent if he counts incorrectly.
But. This may be more of a commentary on developers and public-domain games like cribbage, but the graphics feel…old. Like New Kids on the Block old. Like Windows 98 old. The out-of-focus wood-grain table that’s almost the same shade as the cribbage board, the atrocious and frankly unreadable playing-card backs, the odd sound effects that are supposed to mark the passage of the pegs along the board, and the kinda creepy boos when you lose — it’s a port of a game from an era with different graphical standards. The hallmark of a decent iPhone game is graphics, graphics, graphics. On this platform, anything else just stands out.
But if you like playing cribbage — and you know you do — then there aren’t a whole lot of options available, and Trivial produces the best of the lot.