War

How to play

1. Tap Flip and both sides turn a card: You land on a table that is already dealt: 26 cards each, no setup screen, no tutorial. Tap the full width Flip button and both top cards turn over at once. For two players, switch to the two-player mode and each half of the screen gets its own flip key — the cards only turn when both have pressed.
2. The higher card takes both: Ace is high, then King, Queen, Jack and down to the two. Suits do not matter at all — a five of hearts and a five of spades are dead equal. The winner sweeps both cards to the bottom of their pile and their counter ticks. You can tell who won without reading a word: just watch which way the cards fly.
3. Play 40 rounds, most cards wins: The progress bar reads "Round N of 40" from round zero, so you always know where the finish line is. When the count runs out, whoever holds more cards wins; equal counts are a dead heat. Cleaning the other side out ends it early. Want a longer session? Switch to the 240-round game in settings.

Rules & variants

Full rules of War: shuffle a standard 52-card deck (no jokers), split it down the middle, and each player holds 26 cards face down. Every round both players turn their top card face up, and whoever shows the higher rank takes both cards and puts them at the bottom of their own pile. Ace is high, then King, Queen, Jack, ten and so on down to the two. Suits are irrelevant. That is the entire game — there are no plays to choose, no hand to manage, and no way to know what your next card is.

When both cards match, that is a war. This site settles the long-running disagreement one way and states it plainly: each side buries ONE card face down, then turns one more card face up, and the higher of those two face-up cards takes all six cards on the table. If the second pair matches again, the same thing repeats — another card down, another card up — and the pile keeps growing until someone wins it all in one sweep. Plenty of other versions bury three cards instead of one; we use one because on a phone in portrait a war then only needs three visual slots per side, which keeps the pips above 34px and readable. Feel free to house-rule three cards with a physical deck; this web version does not offer that switch.

What happens if you run out of cards mid-war: you play what you have. You bury a card face down only if you can, and your very last card must always be turned face up to settle the war — so being down to one card still leaves you a way back. That is why the two sides of the table can legitimately show different numbers of cards (two against three, say); it is not a bug. If it is your turn to play and you hold nothing at all — draw pile empty, won pile empty — you lose the game on the spot and every card on the table goes to your opponent. In the rare case where both sides run dry at once (all 52 cards are on the table at that point), the round is voided, every card goes back to whoever put it there, and the game is decided on cards held; equal counts are a dead heat.

Cards you win get reshuffled before they come back: when your draw pile is empty and only your won pile is left, that pile is shuffled before it becomes your new draw pile. This is not a cosmetic detail. If you never shuffle and simply flip the won pile back over in capture order, better than one game in ten degenerates into a see-saw that runs for thousands of rounds without resolving. Reshuffling plus a round cap is what kills the oldest complaint about War — that a game of it can literally never finish.

The round cap is a rule, not a safety net. A short game is 40 rounds and a long game is 240, and the progress bar sits at the top of the screen from round zero, so you know the length before you start. When the count runs out the player holding more cards wins, and 26 to 26 is a dead heat. One round means both sides turned one face-up card and the table was settled — no matter how many wars broke out inside it or how tall the pile got, that is still one round. The 240 figure came out of simulating a thousand games: at that length about a third of them finish naturally with somebody cleaned out, and anything shorter is almost always decided by the cap instead.

Strategy and win rate in War: there is none, and that is by design. The game hands the player no decisions at all — the cards are face down, you cannot know what is coming, you cannot choose an order, and the outcome is 100% determined by the deal, so over many games it is a coin flip. Anyone selling you tips to improve your odds at War is making it up. The three things you genuinely control are game length, animation speed (slow, normal, fast) and whether auto play is on; two players can also agree who takes which key. This game sells luck and rhythm, not thinking.

Variants and house rules available on this page: short 40 or long 240, versus the computer or two players sharing one screen, three animation speeds, an auto-play toggle, and "play a game code" — paste the code from a previous game and you get the exact same deal back, card for card. Two house rules you can agree on with a physical deck are burying three cards on a war instead of one, and playing with no cap until somebody is cleaned out (be ready for half an hour). Neither is offered here, and it is written down so you do not mistake it for a missing feature.

A worked example of the first six rounds: round one you show ♠K against ♦7 and take both, 27 to 25. Round two your ♥4 loses to ♣J, back to 26 all. Round three you both show a nine — war. Each of you buries a card, you turn ♥A and the opponent turns ♠10, so you sweep all six cards, 29 to 23. Round four the opponent's ♥Q wins. Round five you both show a six and war breaks out again; this time their ♣K beats your ♦2 and they take six, 25 to 27. Round six your ♥5 beats ♦3 and you are level at 26 all. At every single moment the two counts add up to 52 — that is the first test we run on every change.

The summary screen tells you what actually happened in those two minutes: a line chart of your card count with one point per round and a marker on every round that went to war, plus how many wars broke out, how many you took, your longest winning streak and your biggest lead. Losing a game with no decisions in it is more baffling than frustrating, and that line is what turns a random walk back into a story you can read — who was ahead the whole way, and which war flipped it. Your record and streak live in this browser only; there is no leaderboard and no account.

FAQ