Looking in my book of traditional card games, I realised it described a couple of solo forms of Cribbage – a game I love but never get to play – so that occupied me for an hour or so tonight.
The first variant is like the normal game without the ‘play’ phase, and where you’re always the dealer. You deal six cards to yourself, two to the box, discard two from your hand to the box, draw a starter card, and then simply score both hands. You repeat until you’ve used the entire deck (six rounds), and ‘win’ if you reach 120 – which means averaging 20 points (across both hands) per round! (This target is so tough that I’ll be genuinely surprised if I ever manage it. I did manage a score of 32 in a single round in my last game, but that felt like pulling a rabbit from a hat, and my end game total was still ‘only’ 94.)
Then there’s a ‘patience’ game which was very different and pretty neat. You just draw and place cards one at a time until you have filled a 4x4 grid, with cards going into any empty space. Then you draw a starter card and score the eight hands represented by all the rows and columns, and you ‘win’ if you reach 61 points. So you’re trying to construct the best eight hands you can, with each card contributing to two independent hands, and without knowing in advance which cards are coming next, and with a continually shrinking set of available spaces to play into as the game proceeds.
(This variant feels a bit like Village Green, if you’ve played that.)
Neither is a patch on playing with another person, but they’re both enjoyable, and I was extremely happy to be putting my crib board to some kind of use, and will definitely be trying again to reach those target scores in the coming days : ) (My very best score in either game was about 3/4 of the target for ‘winning’, so I’m going to need rather a lot of luck.)
Edit: I found some other variants online, some of which include ‘play’ phases: