How We Verify These Rules

Rules aren't opinions, but they aren't always singular either — plenty of classic games have a widely recognized standard version alongside genuinely common regional and family variants, and a rules reference is only trustworthy if it's honest about which is which. This page explains how every page on this site is actually put together.

Rules are facts; we verify them against multiple sources

A game's rules — how many cards make a legal meld, when a bid can be doubled, what breaks a tie for the win — are facts, not the copyrightable expression of any one publisher. Every rules page on this site is checked against multiple independent sources for that specific game — published rule compendiums, established game reference works, and, where a game has one, an official publisher rulebook — before it's written. Where sources genuinely disagree (which happens more often than most rules sites admit, particularly for dice games and older card games with no single governing body), the page says so plainly rather than inventing false certainty.

Where the words on the page actually come from

The specific wording a publisher or reference work uses to explain a rule IS covered by copyright, even though the underlying rule is not — which is exactly why closely tracking a source sentence by sentence would defeat the whole point of checking several of them in the first place. The actual writing step happens with every source closed: the facts get confirmed first, set aside, and only then does someone draft the explanation from what they now understand rather than from a page still open in another tab. A page that can't clear that bar doesn't get published until it can — this is treated as a hard requirement, not a style preference.

How official rules and house rules are told apart

A large share of the disputes covered under Settle an Argument exist precisely because tables genuinely play common variants that differ from a game's standard published ruling. Each of those pages is built around a single ordering: the standard ruling comes first, on its own, and any widely-played variant gets its own clearly marked line underneath it — never merged into one description as if the two were interchangeable. The point isn't to declare the variant wrong; it's to make sure a table knows which one it's actually agreeing to play before an argument breaks out over which was "the real rule" all along.

What counts as a "commonly-argued" edge case

Not every technically-possible rules question earns its own callout on a dispute page — the bar is specifically whether it's a moment real tables are known to stop and argue about, not merely a scenario that's theoretically ambiguous. Scoring interactions that produce a counterintuitive result (like a duplicated rank letting a run score twice in cribbage), genuine regional variation in a widely-played rule, and moments where two commonly-consulted sources actively disagree are the three patterns that reliably earn a page.

Commercial games: nominative, fair-use summaries only

Widely known commercial games are covered as an independent, fair-use summary of how they are played — describing the rules of a trademarked game to identify it is standard nominative use, not an infringement, but it comes with real limits we hold to strictly: no publisher logos, no card or board art, no claim of affiliation or endorsement, and no reproduction of a rulebook's actual wording. The full legal notice is on the trademark disclaimer page, and a short version of it appears directly on every page covering a commercial game.

Corrections and updates

If a page states something incorrectly, or a rule genuinely changed in a newer official edition of a game, contact us with specifics — which page, which claim, and ideally a source — and it gets checked and corrected. A rules reference that can't be corrected isn't a serious one, and a correction is treated with exactly the same multi-source verification as a brand-new page, not as a quick unverified edit. The goal throughout is the same one this whole site is built around: an answer a table can trust mid-game, not a guess dressed up to look authoritative.