If you’re reading this review, I’m going to guess you fall into one of two camps: one, an elderly member of your family taught you how to play Cribbage as a child and now you harbour a deep love for the game. Or two, you’ve never played it and you think it’s a boring game for old fogies.

Cribbage, on its own, is just a card game where you are trying to score the most points. If the only thing that you know about Cribbage is that there’s a special board, then all you need to know is that board is literally just a score tracker. As you score points in the game, you move your peg along the board, and the first player to get 121 points is the winner. You literally don’t need a board to play Cribbage, you can just keep score with a piece of paper.

And let’s be honest, simply racing to 121 points can get stale over time and repeated plays. If the goal of every hand of every game is to just to score the most points, then after repeated plays, Cribbage can kind of start to feel like it can play itself. Eventually you’ll intuit the statistics at the heart of the game. You’ll know which cards you should keep, what you should throw, and which card combinations would give you the greatest chance of getting the most points. There might be a little bit of reading your opponent and thinking about what they might have, and playing based on what they might have, and perhaps tempting them into playing the right card for you to score even more points than you might have otherwise thought possible. But that’s quite on the periphery of Cribbage. The game is just, score the most points.

So Crib Wars has a much larger board, with 363 pegs, making this game last about as long as three regular games of Cribbage. At first glance, this monstrosity of a board can seem overwhelming. There are lines and shortcuts and extra tracks and speed traps and all kinds of things that you really are not used to seeing on a Crib board.

The first 121 pegs are basically nothing. It’s just a regular game, but it has the potential to set you up for success. After the first third of the game, it suddenly gets more interesting. There are speed traps that, if you land on them, you have to go back 20 points, and your opponent gets to go forward 20 points. In a two-player game, there are penalties that you can fall onto that make you run backwards on the track, depositing you back on an earlier spot, or conversely sneaky shortcuts that let you skip whole sections of the main track, shortcuts boosting your score as you race towards the finish line.

Suddenly, as you approach the spots on the board that will give you positive or negative benefits, you need to start thinking about Cribbage in a way you might not have ever had to do before. You might have to play suboptimally to dodge a punishing time sink. Or maybe you’ll choose to let a run pass you by, because you only need 2 points to nail that shortcut. You could play a card to score six-points for a trips, but suddenly that’s not actually in your interest anymore.

It seems like such a small wrinkle to add to Cribbage, but I love how it changes the way I approach each hand. It makes the game three times as long, but it also allows for wild swings in score. Someone can be 45 points ahead and feeling hopeless, but then they accidently land on a time trap and they go back 20 points and you go forward 20 points, and suddenly the tables have turned.

Crib Wars is more dynamic. It’s more interesting, and I enjoy it more, even if it distorts the pure Cribbage experience. But it’s the kind of game that I can recommend only to people who have played a fairly significant amount of Cribbage. You should know if you’re the kind of player who fits the bill. If you’ve ever found yourself letting your hands play themselves, Then Crib Wars offers a wrinkle that helps you to start thinking again.

I have to say that it also feels incredibly satisfying when you are successful in manipulating your opponent and giving yourself an extra point to land on that shortcut, or playing your cards in a way that forces them to hit that negative track. Those moments are few and far between, but it’s fun to try and maniupulate your score and your opponents score. And when those moments do come to fruitition, they’re incredibly exhilerating.

So really, Crib Wars is for someone who already knows they like Crib. And if you already know you like Crib and you saw the board at the start of the article and started salivating, then you already know that this game is for you.

Meanwhile, if you have never had an interest in Cribbage, this is not where I would recommend you start.