Card Game War

OBJECTIVE OF WAR: The objective of the game is to win all cards.

1. War is a very simple card game for two players. Much like real war it's incredibly long and pointless. It's mostly a kids game, since it relies exclusively on luck of the draw. Like most card games it has plenty of regional variations, but the rules used on this site are the standard rules from Wikipedia. The game is played as follows.
2. The basis is a normal game of War, in which wars consist of three cards played face down followed by one face up. The deck includes two jokers, which are the highest cards. When cards are won, they are not added to the bottom of the winner's card supply but placed in a pile face up beside the player.

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NUMBER OF PLAYERS: 2 players

NUMBER OF CARDS: standard 52-card

RANK OF CARDS: A, K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2

THE DEAL: Each player receives 26 cards – dealing one at a time. Each player places his stack of cards face down, in front of him.

TYPE OF GAME: Shedding

AUDIENCE: Family

HOW TO PLAY WAR

The game uses a standard 52-card deck. Shuffle the cards sufficiently before playing, especially if the deck is brand new. Either player can be the dealer or a third person. Deal cards back and forth so that each player has 26 cards. Do not look at your cards.

To play, count down from 3 and flip cards at the same time so that they are face up. Only flip the top card, no peaking! Other cards must remain secret. The player with the higher card wins and collects both cards, return cards to the bottom of their personal deck. If players flip the same card, the war begins.

THE WAR

During a war, each player places three more cards, face-down, on the game playing surface. After, flip over a fourth card so that it is face up. Whoever’s card is the highest is the winner, they collect all 10 cards and the next round begins. If the fourth cards are also the same, repeat the previous instructions until there is a winner.

If a player does not have enough cards for the war they must place their last card face-up.

VARIATIONS

Multi-Player

Card Game War Online

If you wish to play with 3 or 4 players, follow the same directions listed above. However, when dealing each player should have 17 or 13 cards, respectively.

A war in a three or four player game: If there is a 3 or 4 person tie for highest card, each player places a single card face-down followed by a single card face-up. The player who has the highest card wins. If it results in another tie, follow the rules previously stated and another war shall commence.

Steal War

Some variations include Jokers in the deck, they are considered the highest card that beats all others, including the variation Steal War, developed by Gary Philippy and Hayes Ruberti.

In Steal War, the game is somewhat of a hybrid between War and Stealing Bundles. It is based on normal War, where wars consist of three cards face-down and one face-up, however with the addition of the high-value Jokers to the deck. Another difference is that after a war has been one, instead of collecting cards and placing them at the bottom of one’s deck, they are placed in a separate pile face-up. Cards that are newly won are placed on top, and the winner can decide which to place directly on top.

As opposed to traditional War, players look at their cards from the face-down pile before playing them. If the value of your card matches the top card of your opponent’s face-up pile, you have the opportunity to steal that pile. Place your card on top of the pile you wish to steal, steal it, and place the new deck on top of your face-up pile without changing the order of any of the cards. The game continues.

Once a card is played you lose the opportunity to steal, however, you may choose to play and not steal. You may choose to play if you have a greater opportunity of winning a war rather than stealing a small pile.

In multi-player, if your card matches more than one of your opponent’s deck, you may steal both decks.

During War, the three cards played face down can not be looked at or used to steal a pile. However, the fourth card can be used to steal.

If the face-down pile runs dry, the face-up pile shall be shuffled and used to continue the game. If a player runs out of cards during War they automatically lose the game.

Război

In Război, the Romanian version of War, the number of cards used in the war is determined by the number on the card which initiated it.

For example, if 2 (or more) players flip an 8, place 7 cards face-down in the war, and the eighth face-up.

In this variation all face cards have a value of 10, so during a war 9 cards should be placed face-down and the tenth face-up.

REFERENCES:

https://www.pagat.com/war/war.html

How to Play War

Photo by Jack Hamilton on Unsplash.

During Thanksgiving Break I played the card game War with my girlfriend and remembered how wonderfully mindless it is. Because there's no strategy or decision-making, it was feasible to write a program to play the game. Once I could simulate one game, I could simulate several and collect some statistics.

Evidently the rules of War have some gaps, including what to do with the cards you win. Do you place them on the bottom of your deck, in order, or do you shuffle and reuse them once your deck is empty? Why not program both methods and compare? Here is a plot of both approaches after 100,000 trials of each. The x-axis is the number of turns required to complete the game, and the y-axis is the frequency of that outcome across 100,000 trials.

Card Game War Rules

The data proved more interesting than I expected.

• Shuffling the winnings led to much faster games — a mean of 262, a mode of 84, and a max of 2,702 turns.
• When the winnings aren't shuffled, the numbers are less clear. Many games were seemingly infinite so I added a cap of 5,000 turns per game. 11,837 (11.8%) of the games hit this limit (and do not appear on the graph). But plenty of games ended after 4,000+ turns, so we could expect many of these long games to be finite as well. If we ignore the capped games, the mode is 104 turns.
• Both plots show a binary distribution of the results, as you can see in the higher and lower groupings of dots. It turns out that games are more likely to finish after an even number of turns. Each player starts with 26 cards, so if there are no wars and one player wins every hand, the game will last 26 turns. For every turn that player loses, they must win an additional hand to cancel the loss, so the game still requires an even number of turns. Only a war will break this trend because 4 cards change possession instead of 1. A game with an odd number of wars will take an odd number of turns to complete (ignoring wars with fewer than 3 cards, when one player's deck is low).

Card Game War Unblocked

As for the program, here it is in JavaScript. The highlighted lines show the changes made between the Shuffle and No-Shuffle versions.

Card Game War

To close, enjoy the amazing uniqueness of a well-shuffled deck.