Studio News · September 11, 2026
The point was never the product.
The point is the people around the table.
I love card games and board games, but the cardboard, cards, dice, and rules are not what make a game matter to me. What matters is what happens because of them: friends laughing, family slowing down long enough to be present with one another, a conversation that would not have happened otherwise, or two people discovering that an hour across a table can turn into a real connection.
My faith in Christ is part of why that matters so much to me. Disrupt Games is one way I can share something I love, practice hospitality, create reasons for people to gather, and sometimes open the door to conversations that matter far beyond who won the game.
If one of my games never earns a dollar but gives a family or a group of friends a good hour together, it did something worthwhile.
Creative Commons
So why not just use a Creative Commons license?
That is a fair question, because I genuinely like Creative Commons. It is one of the best systems ever built for a creator who wants to say, clearly and in advance, “Here is what you may do with my work.”
Creative Commons does not mean an author simply throws away copyright. The creator keeps copyright and chooses a standardized license granting the public specific reuse rights. Creative Commons currently provides six main licenses built from a small set of understandable conditions. Creative Commons explains the licenses here, and its license chooser is an excellent tool for deciding whether one fits a project.
That range is exactly why Creative Commons is so useful. A photographer, teacher, writer, ministry, researcher, artist, or designer can choose how open they want a copyrighted work to be, and everyone downstream gets a common legal vocabulary instead of having to guess.
Why Disrupt Games is different
I want the games to be free to play without closing a door I may someday want open.
A Creative Commons license is intentionally durable. Once a work has been released under a CC license, people who received that version may continue relying on those permissions. That permanence is a strength when open reuse is the goal. It is also something a creator should choose deliberately.
For Disrupt Games, I want to make a slightly different promise. I want you to be able to download a game, print it, bring it to your kitchen table, church game night, campground, picnic table, convention hotel room, or wherever people can sit down together and play. I want playtesters to mark things up, try house rules at their own tables, find the cracks, and tell me what broke.
What I do not want to grant automatically is the right to publicly host my files, redistribute my rulebooks and artwork, publish modified editions, or commercially release the material. Keeping those rights together means that if a publisher someday believes one of these games deserves broader treatment, I can have that conversation without discovering that I already granted permanent public redistribution rights to an earlier edition.
The game remains easy to obtain for personal, noncommercial play.
Make the copies your personal play group needs and get the game in front of real people.
If a publisher can take the same design to thousands more tables, the rights are still clean enough to explore that opportunity.
A publisher would be a larger megaphone for the same mission, not proof that the game finally mattered.
If that opportunity never comes, nothing failed. The game can still be here, free for people to play. If a publisher does come along and shares the same excitement about putting good games in front of more people, that could expand the impact tremendously. Either outcome can be good.
What success looks like
I am not trying to become the next great game designer.
I design because I love games and because I love what games can do between people. If something I make ends up in a publisher’s catalog, reaches a larger audience, and sits on tables I will never see, I would be overjoyed. That would be an extraordinary privilege.
But a publishing contract is not the definition of success here. A game played by four friends after dinner matters. A family taking one to a picnic matters. A church group laughing over a hand of cards matters. Sitting across from one person, slowing down, talking, and being genuinely present matters.
That is what Disrupt Games is about: friends, family, relationships, connection, and the joy that comes from gathering. My Christian faith is inseparable from why I value those things and why I want the work I make to serve people rather than merely become another thing to sell them.
So the license is intentionally generous where the mission happens: at the table. It becomes more careful only when the activity changes from playing the game to publicly republishing the game.
The actual permission
Short version: play it. Test it. Please don’t republish it.
The plain-language sections above explain the intent. The notice below is the permission statement used on Disrupt Games game pages.
Read the full Copyright & Usage notice
© 2026 Disrupt Games. All rights reserved.
Permission is granted to download, print, and make copies of these materials for personal, noncommercial play and playtesting. Materials may be shared within your personal play group for those purposes.
Commercial use, sale, public redistribution or hosting, and distribution of modified versions are prohibited without prior written permission from Disrupt Games.
Disrupt Games may revise or withdraw this permission for future versions of a game.
Unless otherwise stated, all game rules, printable materials, artwork, and other original content remain the property of their respective copyright owner.
Now go play something.
The permission model exists to protect possibilities, not to keep games away from people. The best thing you can do with a Disrupt Games design is exactly what it was made for: gather some people, put it on a table, and see what happens.