War (card game)

War is a playing-card game in which players reveal the top card of their piles, and the higher rank wins both cards. Ties trigger a face-down-and-face-up showdown called a war.

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Playing card: A card designed for games, typically marked with a suit and rank. War uses a standard deck whose ranks decide each round’s winner.
Standard 52-card deck: A deck containing four suits of thirteen ranks each, without jokers. This is the common deck used for the familiar version of War.
Beggar-My-Neighbour: A two-player card game in which special ranks force a rival to pay cards from a pile. It also captures cards through repeated comparisons but uses rank-specific payment rules.
Game theory: The mathematical study of strategic interaction among decision-makers. War illustrates a game with little strategic choice once the deck is shuffled.
Expected value: The probability-weighted average of the possible values of a random quantity. It offers a way to quantify expected game duration or cards won.
Card rank: A card’s ordered value within a game, such as two through ace. Comparing ranks, rather than suits, determines who takes the revealed cards.
Suit (cards): One of the symbolic categories into which a playing-card deck is divided. Suits identify cards, though they normally do not break ties in War.
Snap (card game): A card game in which players race to call out when matching cards appear. Unlike War’s rank contest, Snap rewards attention and speed.
Stochastic process: A collection of random variables describing the evolution of a system over time. The changing piles can be studied as a random process driven by card order.
Markov chain: A stochastic process whose next state depends only on its current state. A simplified model can ask how likely War is to end from a given configuration.