War

The deck is dealt evenly and face down, 26 cards to each player, as an unseen draw pile — the Ace ranks high. Each round, both players turn up the top card of their pile at the same time. Whoever's card outranks the other takes both cards and slides them to the bottom of their own pile, in the order they were played. There is nothing to choose: the top card turns up automatically for both sides every round.

The game ends the instant one player holds all 52 cards.

A tie triggers a war. Each player lays their next three cards face down as a stake, then a fourth card face up. Whoever's face-up card is higher takes every card on the table — both stakes and both face-up pairs, from every round of the chain — and moves them all to the bottom of their pile. If those two face-up cards also tie, the war repeats again with the pile still growing, for as long as it keeps tying (a "double war", or longer).

If a player is running low on cards, they lay down as many as they have while keeping at least one back to turn face up, so the war can still be settled; a player with no card left at all to turn face up has nothing left to contest with and loses on the spot. This is the most commonly cited house ruling for the situation — War has no single official rulebook, and sources agree on the shape of the game more than on this one edge case.

No — genuinely none. Neither player ever makes a choice: the top card turns up automatically every round for both sides, and every consequence follows fixed rules from there. War is a game entirely of the order the deck happened to be shuffled into, which is exactly why it works as a game for very young children and why it holds no interest at all for anyone looking for a game of skill.

In principle, yes, and this is a real and well-documented property of the game rather than a bug: because cards return to the bottom of a pile in a fixed, played order, the whole game is a deterministic function of the current arrangement of the two piles, and a finite number of possible arrangements means certain starting deals provably cycle without ever reaching a winner. This board applies a round cap — after 10,000 rounds, whichever player holds more cards is declared the winner, with an exact tie called a draw — purely as a safeguard against that mathematical curiosity, since a real, non-cyclic game is almost always decided in well under a few hundred rounds.