War Strategy: An Honest Guide to a Game of Pure Luck

Let's be straight with you from the first line: there is no strategy in War. Neither player ever makes a choice. You turn up the top card, your opponent turns up theirs, and the higher card wins. A world champion and a four-year-old would win exactly as often. Anyone who tells you otherwise is pulling your leg.

That doesn't mean there is nothing worth knowing. Understanding what actually decides a game makes it more fun to watch, helps you pick the house rules that suit you, and gives you something to talk about when a grandchild asks why they keep losing. The numbers on this page come from playing 5,000 games of our War game with the standard rules.

Why There Are No Decisions

In most card games your skill lies in choosing: which card to play, which to keep, when to take a risk. War takes all of that away. Your pile is face down, you must play the top card, and won cards go underneath in an order nobody controls. Every game is decided the moment the deck is shuffled.

That is why our game has no Hint button, no Undo and no difficulty levels. There would be nothing for a hint to say, nothing worth taking back, and no clever computer to set against a careless one. The computer turns its cards exactly as you do. In fact, every game has a deal number, and replaying the same number plays out the same game card for card, because nothing either of you does can change it.

The Aces Decide More Than Anything Else

If there is one thing to watch, it is the Aces. An Ace can never lose a plain round; the best anyone can do against it is tie it with another Ace and start a war. So the player holding more Aces tends to keep winning the big cards. In our 5,000 games, the number of Aces you were dealt made an enormous difference:

Each Ace is worth about twenty points of winning chance. You can't see your Aces, of course, but you will notice them as the game goes on. If you have turned up two Aces and the computer none, you are in a strong spot. If the computer keeps turning them up, brace yourself.

But Aces can change hands. The one way to lose an Ace is in a war. If your Ace is sitting face down in a war you lose, it goes to the other player. That is why even a player dealt four Aces loses about one game in ten.

Wars Are Where Games Turn

A plain round moves just one card from one pile to the other. A war with one card face down moves three, and a double war five. Wars are rare from round to round, about one round in seventeen starts one, but a full game is long, and in our test a game had about 28 wars on average. Seven games in ten had at least one double war, and roughly one in twelve had a triple war.

Wars matter for a second reason: they are the only time cards go into battle unseen. The face-down cards might be your Aces or your 2s. A war lost can hand your best card to the other player, and a war won can bring you theirs. That is where most of the swings come from.

If you like the drama, choose three cards face down in Settings. Each war then puts ten cards in play instead of six, the swings are bigger, and games are shorter: in our tests about half of them were over in 180 rounds rather than 340.

Comebacks Are Real

One of the pleasures of War is that nobody is beaten until the last card. The lead changes hands about ten times in a typical game. In our 5,000 games, about one game in nine was won by a player who at some point was down to five cards or fewer in their pile. A single lucky war can turn eight cards into eighteen.

Still, being ahead does help. A player in the lead after 50 rounds went on to win about two games in three. Not a sure thing, but a fair sign of which way the cards are leaning.

What You Can Actually Choose

Your real choices in War are made before the first card is turned: they are the house rules. Each one shapes the kind of game you get.

• One or three cards face down. One gives gentle, frequent swings. Three gives fewer, bigger moments and a quicker game.
• Running out in a war. The usual rule ends the game when a player can't finish a war. "Turn your last card up" gives the underdog one last chance and makes for more comebacks.
• Shuffling won cards. Leave it on. It is what keeps every game heading for a finish. Here is why.
• The short game. The single best choice if you have twenty minutes rather than an hour. Pick 26, 50 or 100 rounds and the player with more cards then wins.

How Long a Game Takes

A full game is longer than most people remember. With the standard rules, half our games were over within about 340 rounds, the average was about 450, and a few ran past 2,000. At a real table, at a few seconds a round, that can easily be half an hour or more, which is why so many family games of War end with "let's just count the cards."

Our game gives you three ways to keep it pleasant. Auto-play turns the cards for you at a calm pace, so you can watch with a cup of coffee. Finish the Game plays the rest at once and tells you how it went: how many rounds, how many wars, the longest war and the biggest haul. And the short game house rule puts a limit on it from the start.

Making It Fun with Children

• Say the cards out loud. "Queen beats 9" is good practice for little ones learning their numbers and court cards.
• Count the haul after a war. Six cards, ten cards, fourteen: it turns a lucky moment into a counting lesson.
• Talk about luck. War is a gentle way to learn that losing a game isn't anybody's fault, and that the next shuffle is a fresh start.
• Try the adding version. Each player turns two cards and adds them up; the bigger total wins. It is on the variations page.

When You Want to Make Decisions

War is perfect when you want to relax. When you are in the mood to think, the same deck of cards offers plenty of games where your choices count. Cribbage rewards careful discards and counting, Hearts is all about which cards to pass and when to duck, and Clock Solitaire is another restful game of pure luck if you would rather keep things easy.