How to play War well once you know the rules: the decisions that matter, and the habits that win.
War is the one card game with no strategy at all. You cannot see your own cards, you cannot choose which one to play, and nothing you do changes the order they come in. The winner is fixed by the shuffle before the first card is turned.
So this page is not about how to win. It is about the few choices that do exist — how long to play, and what to make of the game while it happens.
Aces and kings. An ace can never lose a battle, only tie, and the player who starts with more of the high cards usually comes out ahead over a long game.
Wars decide the swings. An ordinary battle moves two cards; a war moves ten and a double war eighteen, and the three cards each player puts face down are chosen by nobody. A player who is well behind can be level again after one tie.
A game of War can go on forever, so the table asks for a number of battles before the start: 25, 50 or 100. When they are played, the cards are counted and whoever holds more wins. A game also ends early if one player holds all 52.
Twenty-five battles is short and swingy: one war near the end can decide it. A hundred gives the high cards time to show, and makes it more likely that the player dealt the better pile wins. Fifty is in between, and is what the table starts with.
Cards you win go to the bottom of your pile in the order they were played, and you only see them again once everything above them has been turned. That is why a king you won early can come back to win a war many battles later.
It is also why the game can circle without ending: the same cards meet in the same order again and again. The site never shuffles your winnings, just as nobody does at a kitchen table.
War is best as a first card game. A child learns the order of the cards, the idea of a tie, and counting to ten when a war is paid out, without having to understand anything else.
For older players it is a game of suspense rather than skill. Count the cards as the battles run out, guess when the next war will come — roughly one battle in seventeen is a tie — and enjoy a lead that can disappear in a single war.