Settle an Argument

Nobody opens this section to learn a game from scratch. They open it because someone just did something at the table that made everyone else stop and go "wait, is that actually allowed" — can you shoot the moon twice in a row in hearts, does going out on your very first turn count in rummy, what happens when a farkle wipes out an entire turn's banked points. Every page here is built around exactly that moment: the specific, recurring arguments a real game produces, not a general rules refresher.

Official ruling first, house rules named separately

Every page in this section leads with the standard ruling for its specific contested moment, then names whatever house-rule variants actually show up at real tables — kept visibly separate from the standard ruling rather than folded into the same sentence as if a table's local habit and the printed rule carried equal authority. That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should: plenty of arguments start because one player learned a house-rule version growing up and assumed it was universal, while the other learned the official rule and assumed the same thing. Settling which one is which usually settles the argument on its own, even before anyone decides which version to actually play going forward.

Why not every game has one of these pages

A dispute page only exists for a game where real, recurring controversy shows up in how people actually play it — a scoring edge case with a genuinely ambiguous official answer, a rule that gets house-modified often enough to be worth naming. Plenty of games on this site are simple enough, or unambiguous enough, that there's nothing here worth a dedicated page — their full rules page already covers everything a table needs. This section is deliberately not exhaustive for that reason; it covers the games that actually generate arguments, not every game this site explains.

Finding the exact argument you're having right now

If you already know which game is causing the argument, the fastest way in is straight to that game's own dispute page, listed below — search for the name directly rather than working backward from which category the game belongs to. If the game isn't listed here at all, its main rules page is still the right stop, since the official rule for whatever's being argued is very likely already covered there even without a dedicated dispute page breaking it out separately.

The kind of argument this section is actually built for

The disputes covered here tend to fall into a handful of recognizable shapes: a scoring rule with a genuinely ambiguous edge case (does a specific combination count double, does going out early cost extra), a turn-order or dealing question that gets misremembered from table to table, and a "can you even do that" moment where one player swears they've always played it a certain way and the rest of the table has never heard of it. None of these are really about who's smarter or who's played longer — they're about which version of a rule the table actually agreed to before the game started, which is usually the thing nobody explicitly discusses until it's already an issue.

What to do once the ruling is settled

Once you know the official answer and whichever house-rule variant your table actually prefers, a printable score sheet or one of the scorekeeper tools is worth having ready so the same disagreement doesn't resurface three rounds later over a number nobody wrote down. And if the dispute turns out to be less about a specific rule and more about which game to play at all, What Should We Play? settles that argument from a completely different angle.