Noddy

Noddy (O.F. naudin) also Noddie, Nodde or Knave Noddy, is a 16th-century English card game ancestor of Cribbage. It is the oldest identifiable card game with this gaming structure and thus probably also ancestral to the more-complicated 17th-century game of Costly Colours. History The earliest reference to the game of Noddy in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1589. The basic term noddy, means a fool or simpleton, but in the gaming sense, it is just the name given to the Knave of the suit turned up at the start of play. A very interesting description of the game can be found in Randle Holme's The Academy of Armory, written in 1688, which displays previously unrecorded scoring features and terminology. Cribbage without the Crib Noddy can be thought of as the "small Cribbage without the Crib". But it would seem that the game of Noddy was played for counters, and that it was fifteen or twenty-one up, as quoted by Shirley. In a play of Middleton's, Christmas, speaking of the sports of that time as children, says that the game was played for thirty one. And in Salton's Tales the game was depicted as being played for twenty one. It is probable, however, that it was played all the three ways, as 15, 21 and 31 points at the choice of the players.