Making War Fun Again

The other night, I picked up what is perhaps one of the most futile card games ever as an iPhone application: War. cards

You remember the game, don’t you? A deck of standard playing cards is shuffled and divided into two armies. Each player overturns their top most cards, the high card “captures” the other, conscripting said card into the winner’s army. Stalemates are met with a “battle” in which four more thrown into the mix, and, again, the high card captures the low card and its reserves.

The entire process is largely determined from the initial deal, with a huge statistical advantage going to the player which happens to land three or more of the deck’s aces. Why? Since the cards are played in the same order, the concept of luck only factors in on that first deal, everything else follows a countable pattern. And since there is no actual skill involved, players can easily walk away after that deal and return for the results.

As a game, that’s horrible. It’s the exact opposite of fun. War manages to reduce a deck of cards to the same level of enjoyment as accounting balance sheets. Obviously, this has to change.

So, in order to make War fun again, I propose two slight modifications to the rules.

First, players do not immediately return their winners and conscripts to their playing deck. Instead, these cards are set in a second deck. When the playing deck is exhausted, the remaining cards are shuffled. This helps to randomize the game and makes it somewhat less boring.

Second, in the event of a battle, each player will draw four cards as in the traditional game of War. However, instead of always turning over the fourth card, the player will choose one of the cards to overturn. Again, this small change allows further factors of chance.

Because these two rules change the flow of the game, making it more random and, well, modern, I’m thinking of calling the new game Modern Warfare 2.

And yes, that was a punchline.

The answer to the obvious follow up question is: Dayquil.

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