War
Also known as Battle
- Players
- 2-4 players (best with 2)
- Deck
- 1 standard deck (52 cards), jokers removed
- Time
- 15-45 minutes
- Difficulty
- Simple
- Category
- Matching & collecting
Setup
Take a 52-card deck and remove the jokers. Shuffle well and deal the whole pack out face down, one card at a time, so that each player has an equal stack. With two players that is 26 cards each; with three, deal 17 each and set the odd card aside so the stacks are level; with four, 13 each.
Nobody looks at their cards at any point. Keep your stack squared up face down in front of you, and leave a clear space in the middle of the table where cards will be turned up.
Cards you win go face down to the bottom of your own stack, so you play from a single pile all game. Neither account tells you what order to put them back in, and one of them points out that this is the one thing in the game that is actually a decision: return them in a fixed order and which card you bury first can change how the whole game turns out. If you would rather the game held no decisions at all, shuffle each batch as it goes underneath.
Ranking is the usual one with aces high: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. Suits are irrelevant from start to finish. There is no dealer advantage and no first player, because everybody acts at the same moment, so choosing who deals is purely a matter of convenience.
Play
Play is a series of battles. On each battle every player takes the top card of their stack and turns it face up in the middle at the same time. The highest rank showing sweeps the table, and those cards go face down under the winner's stack. Suits never break a tie and never matter.
Two equal top cards mean a war. Each tied player buries a single card, face down, over the cards they are contesting, and then turns the next one up. Whichever of those turned-up cards is higher wins the whole heap — six cards between two players, the two that tied plus four more.
If the face-up cards of the war are also equal, the war simply repeats — another card down and another up from each player, and again the higher card takes the lot. There is no cap on this, and while three or four consecutive ties are rare, nothing in the rules stops the sequence continuing.
One card face down is what both published accounts give as the rule, and it is worth saying plainly because the other version is the famous one. Many players bury three cards instead of one, chanting I-de-clare-war or W-A-R as they go down, which puts ten cards at stake in a two-player war rather than six. Both accounts record that as the widespread variation rather than as the game; it is in the variants below. Settle which you are using before the first tie, since it changes how abruptly stacks change hands.
Running short of cards mid-war is the edge case that causes arguments, and both accounts say in as many words that most descriptions of the game are simply unclear about it. They set out two workable answers and rank neither. Under the first, a player who cannot produce the cards to fight the war loses on the spot; if both run dry together, the one who ran out first loses, and if they run out simultaneously it is a draw. Under the second, you turn your final card face up and it stands as your fighting card for every round the war lasts, so one card can still take the lot. Pick one before you deal.
With three or four players everyone flips at once and the highest card takes the whole table. A tie for highest starts a war, and here both accounts go out of their way to correct a common mistake: everybody at the table joins in, not just the players who tied. Everybody lays a card face down and turns another face up, and whoever shows the highest of those takes the lot — which can be a player who was nowhere near the lead when the war started. A player whose cards are gone is out, and the rest continue until one player holds everything.
Goal & scoring
You win by taking every card in the deck. There is no scoring, no tricks to count and nothing to write down. Almost no player decision exists either: once the pack is dealt, the result follows from the order of the cards and from how won cards are put back, and that second one is the only lever anybody has.
Because cards keep circulating, a game can run far longer than beginners expect. One account says simply that it can take a long time, and a game between two evenly matched stacks can churn without either side making progress.
Neither account offers a way of cutting it short, so a cap is a table decision rather than a rule: play for a set time or a set number of battles and give it to whoever holds most cards. Counting is quick because the totals always add up to 52.
Variants
Three cards down — On a tie each player buries three cards face down before turning up the deciding card, so ten cards are at stake in a two-player war rather than six. Both accounts record it the same way — many players do it, and it is a variation rather than the base rule — and it is usually chanted as I-de-clare-war or spelled out W-A-R as the three cards go down. It swings stacks around much faster. One account adds a fix for running short under it: the player with fewest cards plays all they have and the other plays the same number, so a war between unequal stacks is still a fair fight.
Casino War — The banked table-game version, played against a dealer. You bet, then you and the dealer each get one card and the higher card wins even money. On a tie you choose: surrender and forfeit half your stake, or go to war by staking a second bet equal to the first, after which three cards go face down and you and the dealer each get one more face up. Beat the dealer on that second card, or tie it, and both stakes come back with the first bet won over again and nothing more — so ten units staked comes back as ten won or twenty lost and nothing in between. A tie on the first two cards can also be backed on its own, paying 10 to 1.
Rank sets the stake — The number of cards buried in a war is decided by the rank that caused it: two for a war over twos, three for threes and so on up to ten for any court card and eleven for aces. A war over aces therefore swallows most of a stack, which makes the high cards frightening rather than simply good. If somebody cannot cover it, everyone plays as many as the shortest stack can manage. One account reports this as the Romanian game Război.
Race for an ace — Replace the buried cards entirely. On a tie both players turn cards into the middle face up, singly, going as quickly as they can and without waiting on each other, until an ace shows; whoever played it takes everything on the table. Cards won are piled face up before their winner rather than slid under the stack, and go back into hand, turned over, only once that face-down supply runs dry. It turns the one moment of tension in the game into a genuine race.
Jokers high — Leave both jokers in and rank them above the ace, so a joker beats everything. With 54 cards the two-player deal is 27 apiece and the three-player deal is 18 apiece with nothing left over. Because a joker is so strong, one account suggests taking the two of them out before dividing the pack and burying one in each player's stack, so that nobody can be dealt both. The jokers are equal to each other, so if they meet you fight an ordinary war over them.
Rules checked against Pagat, Wikipedia, Bicycle Cards, Dice Game Depot, Geeky Hobbies, Gamerules.com, Wizard of Odds, Card Game Wiki.