About Lawn Game Rules

Use Lawn Game Rules to mark out a court, check a score or settle a disputed play. Each page gathers what a governing body, league or equipment maker has published about one game, restates it in plain English and draws the layout to scale. You can print the reference and take it outside.

Lawn Game Rules publishes this reference. It compiles published rulebooks; it is not coaching and not expert advice. Nobody working on the site claims a playing record, a tournament title or an officiating licence. The pages give you the document trail instead, so you can judge a rule by the source it came from.

How a game earns a page

A game gets a page once we can cite a published rulebook for it and its layout is worth drawing: a court, a pitch, a board or a set of stakes with measurements a reader would mark out on grass. A game we cannot source stays off the site rather than running on a guess.

How we choose and check the sources

We prefer the governing body’s own current rulebook. Where a body publishes none, we fall back to a league or tournament committee’s rules for its own events, then to the equipment maker’s printed instructions, and the page says which kind of document each figure rests on. Before publishing, we open the publisher’s own index of rules and confirm that the edition listed there is the edition we cite. The page records the date of that check next to the date we retrieved the document. Methodology sets out the labels, the checks and their limits.

Reviews and new editions

We check a publisher’s index again at every review of the page. When a body issues a new edition, we hold the page for review and read the changed sections against what we published, rather than swapping figures on the strength of a version number. A page that survives that reading keeps its wording and gains a new review date. A page that changes gains a new modification date as well.

When a page is wrong

Write to us. Contact us with the page address, the line you doubt and, if you have it, a pointer to the rule in the source. We compare the report with the document, correct the page where the report holds up and date the correction. Where a rulebook leaves a question open, we say so on the page instead of inventing an answer.