Put in some more work and you get to here: This is a little better, with the holes not overlapping, but they are way too close together for drilling or pegging! So we start to tweak each hole individually by hand: Some holes overlap on the insides of the curves and some are way too close - when we drill them, they'll break into each other.Īnd others on the outside of the curve are a long way apart.

Yeah - it's a mess isn't it! Computers are not really good at doing this. What happens if you try to force the gaps between fives to line up? The start and finish groups are always good, but around the curves things start to vary. With a compound curvy board and equal spacing, they won't line up. It may take you a moment to notice that the groups of five just don't line up with each other. Sometimes a problem arises when a customer is still thinking of the conventional rectangular layouts as shown above. Two tracks, equally spaced throughout and looking neat. Now let's add just 40 holes to keep this simple:Įasy to peg along, huh? Plenty of space between holes and it's clear where you should go. The difficulty in laying out holes comes when the shape is a one-off, custom board, which is not geometrically shaped. What we are interested in discussing here though, are casual play boards where good, neat design and innovative shapes trump tournament-style regimented layouts. Tournament boards usually have long, straight lines of holes to prevent costly mistakes in tournament play. Modern 3d design software, such as we use, makes it easy to place equally-spaced holes along a track. We can choose proportions that allow us to place holes in curves that look really nice.

When the board is rectangular or round, this is pretty straightforward. There is a path laid out from start to finish to peg along. Most boards have 120 holes per track plus a finish hole and usually a couple of starting holes.Ĭonvention has the holes set out in groups of five to make them easier to count and peg. Below is our attempt to explain why we do things the way we do. One of the difficult-to-explain concepts in cribbage board design is the layout of holes.

How many holes in a cribbage board