War

Players and equipment

Two to four players and a standard 52-card deck. There are no decisions at all: War settles arguments and lasts car journeys, and that is its whole job. Children can play from about four, as soon as they know which of two numbers is bigger and that a king beats a jack. Two players is the real game; three and four work and are described below.

The deal

The deck, dealt evenly, face down in a pile in front of each player — twenty-six each at two, seventeen at three with one card set aside, thirteen each at four. Nobody looks at their cards. You play from the top of your pile and never choose.

Play

Both players flip their top card at once. Higher rank takes both cards, aces high, suits meaningless; captured cards go under your pile. The ranks run two, three, four and so on up to ten, then jack, queen, king and ace, so an ace beats everything and a two beats nothing.

A tie is war: each player lays one card face down — some schools lay three — and one face up. The higher face-up card takes everything on the table; another tie, another war on top of it. A player who runs out of cards mid-war flips their last card face up and it has to serve.

With three or four players the game is the same, with one change worth knowing: when two players tie for the highest card, everybody at the table joins the war, not only the two who tied. Anybody who runs out of cards drops out and the rest play on.

Scoring

There is no score. There are the cards, moving one flip at a time.

Higher card

Takes both

Aces high

Tie

Takes the lot

One down, one up — war

Out of cards

Out of the game

Pile empty mid-war or not

If you want to keep a record, the thing to record is who won each game. On SquareScores, War is a match table: one round is one game, and a tap on the winner's name is the whole entry, so six games come out as four to two.

A worked battle and a worked war

Alice and Ben have twenty-six cards each. They flip: Alice shows a nine, Ben a four. Nine beats four, so Alice takes both cards and slides them under her pile. She now has twenty-seven and Ben has twenty-five. That is a battle, and most turns are exactly that.

Next flip, both show a seven. That is war. Each of them lays one card face down on their seven, then one card face up. Alice's face-up card is a king; Ben's is an eight. King beats eight, so Alice takes everything on the table.

Alice

3 cards staked

The seven, one face down, the king

Ben

3 cards staked

The seven, one face down, the eight

On the table

6

Six cards, all to Alice

Before the war Alice had twenty-six cards after playing her seven and Ben had twenty-four after playing his; each then staked two more. Alice ends with twenty-four plus six, which is thirty, and Ben with twenty-two. One war has moved the game further than five ordinary battles would. Had the king and the eight tied too, each would have laid another card down and another up, and ten cards would have been riding on the second flip.

Ending

One player takes the whole deck and wins, eventually — nobody has ever reliably predicted when. The Russian game Drunkard is a near relation rather than a variant of this one, and is played to its own rules.

There is almost none

Once the cards are dealt there is no choice to make: you turn the top card, and the top card is whatever it is. No amount of thought changes which card comes next, and no player has ever been better at War than another. That is not a flaw. It is why a four-year-old can beat a grandparent, why the game needs no teaching beyond "bigger wins", and why it is the right game for the back seat of a car.

The order you put cards back matters, a little

The one place a hand touches the game is when captured cards go under your pile. If you always put the winning card down first and the losing card on top of it, the pack falls into a pattern and the same battles come round again in the same order, which is one reason a game of War can seem to go on for ever. Shuffling your captured cards before they go under breaks the pattern and gets the game finished sooner. Some tables shuffle the whole pile every time it runs out; that is also fine.

How to make it shorter

The honest answer to a game that will not end is to change the rules before you start. Play with half the pack, which gives a game of ten minutes rather than thirty. Play three cards face down in a war rather than one, so that every war moves ten cards and the lead swings hard. Or play to the clock: agree a time, and when it is up, the player with the most cards wins.

What is worth watching

The count. Knowing you have thirty-one cards to their twenty-one is the whole drama of the game, and a child who counts the two piles after every war is doing arithmetic without noticing. The wars themselves are the other thing: six cards on the table with one down, ten with three down, and a war on a war doubles it. Those are the moments the game turns.

What the app records

Nothing about the cards, because nothing about the cards is under anybody's control. What is worth keeping is the wins: who won the game, and how many games each of you has won over as many as you play. Six games at three each is a tie nobody can complain about, and the count of games is the one number in War that anybody has any interest in.

Three cards down

The commonest change. In a war each player lays three cards face down and then one face up, instead of one down and one up, so ten cards ride on every war rather than six. Children often say a word for each card as it goes down — "I, de, clare, war" — and turn the fourth face up on the last syllable. It makes the game swing harder and finish sooner.

A war on a war

When the face-up cards of a war tie again, the standard game plays another war on top of the first, with the same number of cards down. Some tables raise the stake instead: two cards down for the second war, three for a third. Agree it before you begin, because it is a lot of cards to argue about.

Three or four players

Everyone flips at once and the highest card takes them all. If the two highest cards tie, everybody at the table joins the war, not only the two who tied, so four players may be staking cards over a fight between two of them. A player who runs out of cards is out and the rest carry on. With three players one card is set aside so the deal comes out even.

Aces low

A different reading of the pack: aces are the lowest card and a two beats them. Some families go further and let a two beat an ace and nothing else, so the smallest card in the pack can capture the biggest. Choose one rule and say it before the first flip.

Playing to a time limit

Agree how long the game will last — ten minutes, or until the motorway exit — and when the time is up, each player counts their cards and the most cards wins. It is the only reliable way of guaranteeing a game of War ends, and it changes nothing about how it is played.

Beggar My Neighbour

The other children's game of the same family, and a different game: cards go onto one central pile, and an ace or a court card makes the next player pay cards onto it, the whole pile going to whoever the payment runs out on. It has a page of its own here.

How do you play War?

Deal the pack face down between two players. Both turn their top card at once and the higher card takes both, which go under the winner's pile. If the two cards are the same, it is war: each player lays a card face down and a card face up, and the higher of the face-up cards takes everything on the table. Keep going until one player has every card.

What happens if you run out of cards in the middle of a war?

Your last card is turned face up and has to serve as your card for the war, whatever it is. If you win, you are back in the game with all the cards on the table; if you lose, you are out and your opponent has the pack. If you run out with nothing left to turn at all, you have lost.

Are aces high or low in War?

High, in the usual game: an ace beats a king and everything below it, and a two is the lowest card. Some families play aces low, or let a two beat an ace and nothing else. There is no right answer, only the one you agreed before the game started.

How long does a game of War take?

Anywhere from ten minutes to well over an hour, and there is no way to know in advance. A two-player game with the full pack most often lasts twenty or thirty minutes. If you need it to end, play with half the pack, lay three cards down in a war rather than one, or set a time limit and count the cards when it runs out.

Can you win at War with skill?

No. Once the cards are dealt there are no choices, so nobody can play well or badly, and the result is decided by the shuffle and by the order the captured cards go back under the piles. That is the point of it: it is a game a small child can win against anybody. The only thing you can choose is the rules, and a time limit or a three-card war changes how long it takes without making anybody better at it.

Can three or four people play War?

Yes. Deal the pack as evenly as you can and everyone turns a card at once; the highest takes them all. When the two highest cards tie, everybody at the table joins the war. A player with no cards left is out, and the last player holding cards wins. It is a livelier game than two-handed War and finishes faster, because three piles are being fed into one.