Designing and Developing a Cribbage Board App for Apple's iPhone

Recently I executed an idea I've been kicking around in the back of my head for years, designing a cribbage board app for the iPhone.

The idea to create a cribbage board app was conceived in an airport on a long layover. The airport gift shop sold playing cards. Without a board, we tallied points by hand.

What I wanted to try designing was something that mimicked the mechanics of pegging on a physical board. A cribbage board is usually marked off in increments of five in order to make rapid counting up from the start or back from the finish easy. The two pegs leapfrog each other as points are counted with the back peg being used to count points ahead of the front peg each time.

One of my initial pen sketches of the user interface with notations regarding functionality.

Typically, cribbage is played like tennis, the winner is the best of 3 or 5 games. An investigation of my sketches indicates an initial desire to keep track of the matches as well as a desire to allow the players to choose how many games were necessary to declare a winner. I decided to omit the ability to track matches on the basis of observation that in a 2-player game these were likely to be left unused, which simplified both the UI and the programming significantly.

The user interface elements, designed in the Sketch application.

The initial Xcode storyboard and preview screens.

The final design.

Available in the App Store

The app is available in the US app store, the UK app store, as well as most others.

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