Trademark Disclaimer

RuleShelf covers a mix of public-domain classic games and widely known commercial games. This page explains, plainly, how commercial game names and rules are handled and why that's legitimate.

Rules are facts. Rulebook text is not.

A game's rules — who deals, how a hand is scored, what beats what, how many players it supports — are facts about how the game works, and facts are not protected by copyright. What IS protected is the specific wording a publisher's rulebook uses to explain those facts. RuleShelf never copies, lightly rewords, or closely paraphrases any publisher's rulebook text; every rule explained here is composed once the underlying facts are confirmed, using ordinary language rather than a rulebook's own phrasing. That independence is what nominative fair use actually requires — describing a game accurately without reproducing the specific expression a rights holder owns.

Trademarked names are used nominatively

Some pages on this site describe games whose names — Monopoly, Scrabble, Clue, Risk, Sorry!, Trivial Pursuit, Catan, Jenga, Ticket to Ride, Pictionary, Taboo, Codenames, Sequence, Connect Four, and others — are trademarks of their respective owners (including, among others, Hasbro, Mattel and their respective affiliates and licensees). Using a trademarked name to identify and describe the actual game being discussed is a well-established legal principle called nominative fair use: you're allowed to name a trademarked product in order to talk about it, as long as you don't imply a relationship with the trademark holder that doesn't exist and don't use more of the mark than necessary to make the reference.

RuleShelf is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected in any way to the publisher, manufacturer, or trademark holder of any commercial game described on this site. Every page covering a trademarked game carries a short version of this notice directly on the page, so a reader never has to visit this page separately to know where the site stands.

What we never reproduce

To stay squarely within fair, nominative use, RuleShelf never reproduces a publisher's logo, official card art, box art, or exact board design or layout for any commercial game. Where a visual reference would help explain a rule, it's built as an original, generic illustration — never a copy of licensed artwork. This applies to every page on the site without exception, including the printable score sheets, which are original layouts built from scratch to track a game's own scoring, never a scan or redraw of a publisher's official scorepad.

Public-domain classics are the core of this site

The majority of games covered on RuleShelf — most card games (rummy, hearts, cribbage, spades, euchre, and dozens more), dice games, dominoes games, and pen-and-paper games — have no living rights-holder at all. These are covered in full, unrestricted depth, since there is no trademark or copyright concern in explaining how a public-domain game is played. This is also why the deepest, pillar-level guides on this site skew toward public-domain classics: there's no ambiguity at all about how much detail is fair to include.

Score sheets

Printable score sheets on this site are original layouts, designed by RuleShelf to track that game's scoring — they are not reproductions of any publisher's official scorepad. Where a commercial game's official scorepad has a distinctive, protected design, the sheet on this site is built independently around the same underlying numbers rather than visually copied from it.

Questions about this notice

If you are a rights holder with a concern about how a specific page describes your game, or believe a page has stepped outside fair, nominative use, contact us with the specific page and concern, and it will be reviewed promptly. This notice is reviewed periodically as new commercial games are added to the catalogue, to make sure it continues to describe accurately how those pages are written and what they never include.