How to Play Any Game

About How to Play Any Game

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How to Play Any Game is a plain-language library of game rules. Every game gets exactly one page: a stat strip (players, time, ages, what you need, difficulty), a Quick Start that gets a game moving in about two minutes, the full rules turn by turn, the scoring, and a Settle the Argument section that rules on the game’s famous disputes with the official answer.

How the rules are checked

Rules are facts, but a rulebook’s words belong to its publisher — so every page here is written from scratch, in our own words and our own structure. Before a page is published it is cross-checked against at least two sources, ranked in this order: the publisher’s current official rules for the current edition; the recognised governing or tournament body where one genuinely exists (FIDE for chess, the American Cribbage Congress for cribbage, NASPA for tournament Scrabble); and long-standing references for the traditional games nobody owns. Each page names the edition it covers and carries a last-verified date.

Catan

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The Short Version

Catan is a race to build the strongest settlement network on an island of 19 numbered hexes. Each hex produces one resource — wood (forest), brick (hills), sheep (pasture), wheat (fields), or ore (mountains) — whenever its number is rolled and you have a settlement or city touching it. You spend resources to build roads, settlements, and cities, trade with other players and with the bank, and buy development cards that might help you or secretly be worth points. Settlements score 1 victory point, cities 2, and bonus cards for the Longest Road and Largest Army are worth 2 each. First to 10 points on your own turn wins.

Chess

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The Short Version

Chess is a two-player strategy game on an 8×8 board. Each side commands 16 pieces — one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns — and the players take turns moving one piece at a time. You win by checkmate: attacking the enemy king in a way it cannot escape. There is no luck and no hidden information; everything below is the complete legal game, including the three special moves and every way a game can end in a draw.

Codenames

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The Short Version

Codenames is a team word game. Twenty-five word cards lie in a 5×5 grid, and each one secretly belongs to the red team, the blue team, innocent bystanders, or — in one case — an assassin. Each team’s spymaster can see the secret key and gives one-word clues to guide their operatives to their team’s words. Guess right and you keep going; guess wrong and your turn ends; touch the assassin and you lose instantly. The first team to find all of its agents wins.

Contact

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The fastest way to reach us is email: hello@howtoplayanygame.com

Three things we especially want to hear:

A ruling you think is wrong. Tell us the game, the rule, and your source. Every report gets checked against the publisher’s current rules, and if you’re right, the page is fixed and the correction noted. A rules library is only worth what its corrections are worth.
A dispute we haven’t settled. If your table argues about it, someone else’s does too — send it in and it may join the page’s Settle the Argument section.
A game we haven’t covered. The library grows two games a week, and requests genuinely steer the queue.

How to Play Any Game is published by Dark Haus Studio, Winnipeg, Canada.

Cribbage

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The Short Version

Cribbage is a card game and a race at once. Two (or three, or four) players score points in small bursts — during the play of the cards, then by counting combinations in their hands — and peg every point immediately on a wooden board of holes, two laps of 60 to a game hole at 121. Every deal has three phases: the play (called pegging), the show (counting the hands), and the crib (a bonus hand that belongs to the dealer). First peg home wins — and because the counting order is fixed, games are regularly won by a single hole.

Euchre

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The Short Version

Euchre is a partnership trick-taking game for four players using a short 24-card pack. One side names trump each hand and must then win at least three of the five tricks; fail, and the defenders score. The two Jacks of the trump colour — the bowers — outrank every other card, which is the twist the whole game turns on.

What You Need

Four players in two fixed partnerships, sitting across from each other, and a 24-card pack: the 9, 10, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace of each suit, stripped from an ordinary deck. You’ll also want a simple way to keep score to 10 — two spare cards, one showing pips, is the traditional scoreboard.

Mexican Train Dominoes

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The Short Version

Mexican Train is a domino game about getting rid of your tiles before everyone else. Every player builds a personal line of dominoes — their train — out from one big double in the centre of the table, and a second shared line, the Mexican train, runs alongside. On your turn you add one matching domino to your train, to the Mexican train, or to any train whose owner got stuck and marked it open. If you can’t play, you draw from the boneyard, and if you’re still stuck your train opens up to the whole table. Rounds run from the double-12 down to the double-blank, and the pips stranded in your hand each round count against you. Lowest score after the last round wins.

Monopoly

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The Short Version

Monopoly is a trading and development game: move around the board, buy properties, complete colour sets so you can build houses and hotels, and charge everyone else rent until they can’t pay. The rules below follow the current standard edition. The official game does end — it’s the famous house rules that make it last forever.

What You Need

A standard Monopoly set for 2 to 8 players: board, tokens, two dice, Chance and Community Chest decks, title deeds, play money, and the buildings — 32 houses and 12 hotels, a hard limit that matters (see Scoring). Amounts are in the standard edition’s dollars; themed editions use the same structure with different names.

Privacy Policy

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Last updated: October 16, 2026.

The short version

This site has no accounts, no sign-ups, no comment forms, and no store. You never give us your name, address, or payment details — there is nowhere to enter them. The Rules Finder runs entirely in your browser; nothing you select there is sent anywhere.

What is collected

Aggregate analytics. We use Google Analytics to understand which games people look up and whether pages load well. Analytics data is aggregate and statistical; it is not used to identify you.
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Email you send us. If you write to us, we keep the message so we can answer it and, where relevant, correct a rule. We never sell email addresses or add you to a marketing list.

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Rules Finder

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Scrabble

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The Short Version

Scrabble is a crossword you build together and compete over. On your turn you place one word on the 15×15 board so it connects with what’s already there, score every word your play creates, and refill your rack to seven tiles. Letter tiles carry point values, rare letters are worth the most, and the board’s premium squares multiply scores — but only the first time each square is covered. The biggest single play in the game is the bingo: using all seven rack tiles in one turn earns a 50-point bonus on top of the word. When the bag is empty and one player plays out their last tile, the game ends and leftover tiles change hands on the score sheet.

Texas Hold'em

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The Short Version

Texas Hold’em is a poker game built on shared cards. Each player receives two private cards, five community cards are dealt face up in the centre for everyone to use, and there are four rounds of betting in between. When the betting ends, the best five-card poker hand — built from any combination of your two cards and the five shared ones — wins the pot. This page covers the rules of the game only.

Uno

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What You Need

A standard Uno deck: 108 cards in four colours (red, yellow, green, blue) — number cards 0 to 9, plus Skip, Reverse, and Draw Two action cards in each colour, and the black Wild and Wild Draw Four cards.

Setup

Shuffle, deal 7 cards each, and place the rest face down as the draw pile. Turn the top card over beside it to start the discard pile. If it’s an action card, the first player follows what it says; if it’s a Wild Draw Four, shuffle it back in and flip again.

Yahtzee

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The Short Version

Yahtzee is poker dice played against a scorecard. Thirteen turns, thirteen boxes, and on every turn you roll five dice up to three times, keeping what helps and re-rolling the rest, trying to match one of the scoring categories still open on your card. The upper section rewards steady collecting of each number; the lower section pays flat values for poker-style combinations. The tension is permanent: every box can be scored exactly once, so a roll that fits two boxes forces a choice, and a roll that fits none forces a painful zero somewhere. Highest total after everyone has filled all 13 boxes wins.