While I was playing Cribbage one night, I realized that there's a lot of strategy involved that boils down to some straightforward mathematical calculations. This program attempts to automate those calculations, to help the player make informed decisions while playing the game.

The cribbage solver is hosted on GitHub Pages: https://drbr.github.io/cribbage

Shortly before building this app, I started a new job that used AngularJS, so I wrote this app in AngularJS to become more comfortable with the framework.

At the beginning of each hand, each player is dealt six cards. The player must choose four of these cards to keep in their hand, and two to put into the crib. The crib is an additional four-card hand that is owned by the dealer for that specific turn. At the end of each turn, each player scores their hand, which is composed of their four cards plus a fifth random card (the starter) turned up from the top of the deck. The scoring is a straightforward combinatorial algorithm, which this program implements.

This program allows a player to input their six cards, and it will compute the expected value for each combination of four cards therein, based on the probability of any specific starter card appearing.

This is a self-contained web application written in JavaScript, using freely-available frameworks and libraries. There is no building required, however, the app must be run from within a web server.

There are many simple web servers available; though perhaps the easiest option is to use the http-server available through npm:

# Assuming you are already in the project directory
npm install http-server -g
http-server .

Once the server is running, it can be accessed at http:https://localhost:8080/.

The tests use the Mocha test runner, which runs in the browser. Simply open tests.html, and the tests will run.