Noddy (card game)

Noddy is an English card game first recorded in the sixteenth century and generally regarded as the direct ancestor of modern cribbage. Its name comes from an older English word for a fool or simpleton, later narrowed in card games to mean the knave, or jack, of the trump suit, whose appearance in a player's hand or crib could earn bonus points. Two to four players take part, four handed games typically played in fixed partnerships, and each is dealt three cards from a standard fifty two card deck. Players score points during both the play of the cards and the counting of their hands, building toward a target of thirty one points across several rounds, with the player who cuts the lower card dealing first. Noddy is essentially cribbage without the crib, the extra hand of discarded cards that later became cribbage's signature feature, and it is considered ancestral as well to the more elaborate seventeenth century game of costly colours. The earliest known reference to Noddy appears in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1589, and although the game is now presumed extinct in ordinary play, its rules were republished by the games historian David Parlett in 2008.