Race to Get a Sausage Cribbage Board

The Milwaukee Brewers innocently organized a cribbage board giveaway for their May 17 game at American Family Field and unwittingly set off a minor frenzy with collectors.

The boards featuring the Famous Racing Sausages were given to the first 25,000 fans who passed through the gates for that Saturday’s game against the Minnesota Twins. People lined up early to get their hands on one then, and they’ve been paying a lot of cheddar for them online since. At press time, auctions are starting at nearly $100 on eBay, and Buy It Now offers an approach of $200.

Analysis of that data suggests that Minnesotans are likely behind the souvenir game board extortion. Their deceitfulness and lack of character are well-documented. Wisconsinites would never gouge their fellow residents like that.

In the spirit of your parents saying they can make a better hamburger at home when you wanted fast food, the Drink Wisconsinbly Week in Review kicked around a couple of ideas on how to make a do-it-yourself sausage race-themed cribbage board that surpasses the ones that are causing all the hubbub.

One required getting a nice piece of hardwood, a drill press, a jig saw, a power sander, a laser wood engraver, and a remarkably steady hand. The other involved stapling a variety of cased meats to your current cribbage board.

Upon further discussion, it became obvious that neither option was practical and that maybe everybody would be better off simply bidding on one of the real ones. The prices will almost certainly come down once this initial surge of sausage hysteria blows over.

Or, maybe, learn to do without. The important part of a game of cribbage is not the board you play on; it’s beating the hell out of your friends. If Brat, Polish Sausage, Italian Sausage, Chorizo and Hot Dog could talk, they would tell you the same thing.