The Game That Could Play Itself

War plays out without a single decision. So why isn't it boring?

The rules of War are simple: shuffle the deck and deal it out equally between both players. Each round, both players flip one card — whoever has the higher card takes both. If the cards are equal, “war” is declared: each player puts down some cards face down and one face up, and whoever has the higher final card takes the whole pile (the number of face-down cards varies, usually one or three). The winner is the player who collects all the cards.

Notice what follows from this. Given a fixed way of returning won cards to the deck, the outcome is settled the moment the cards are dealt. Nobody chooses anything — the players only turn over cards in the order the shuffle decided. War is a non-game: a game that could play itself out with nobody at the table, and the result would be exactly the same.

That sounds like a definition of boredom. And yet children play War for hours, and it doesn’t look like endurance in spite of the game — it looks like fun. Granted, you grow out of that fascination, and at some point War does start to bore. But for a good few years before that, it works — and that needs explaining.

You could say that from a game theory perspective nothing happens here, and that’s true. But game theory models strategic interaction — situations where the stakes are a real resource and the outcome depends on what the participants choose. It isn’t the right measure for ordinary games. In its lens, the absence of decisions is the absence of everything, and that says more about the measure than about War.

In the piece on educational games I set out a working definition of a game: a model of a fragment of reality, clearly defined rules, a safe environment for trying things, undertaken voluntarily. War meets all four conditions — including the first, though it’s the least obvious one here. It models two things at once: a hierarchy of values, where one thing ranks above another, and a situation where the outcome is decided by chance alone.

None of those four conditions requires the player to choose anything — and that isn’t an omission in the definition.

So let’s pause over a game with nothing to play, and see what is actually left in it.

An outcome that isn’t up to you

Most games — board games, video games, sports — carry a hidden promise: play well and you’ll win. If you’re losing, you made a mistake somewhere. It’s a fair contract, but not necessarily an accurate picture of the world.

War makes no such promise. The cards are shuffled randomly; you have no influence over what you’re holding. You can play “perfectly” and lose every exchange for twenty minutes straight. That experience — frustrating, but valuable — is a first serious encounter with the idea that outcomes don’t always reflect effort.

It’s a hard lesson at any age. And precisely because it’s hard, there’s something to be said for working through it over an innocent deck of cards, before life delivers it in a more serious context.

Drama without strategy

Something is happening all the time, though. The tension around the table can be completely genuine — because even without decisions, there is dynamics. When one player steadily collects pile after pile for several rounds, then suddenly loses it all in a handful of exchanges — the emotion is real.

It’s worth noticing where that emotion comes from. It isn’t an accident or a lucky side effect — it’s a consequence of the rules. The winner takes both cards, so every exchange moves resources in one direction. A war commits several cards at once, so a single tied round can transfer a pile built up over the previous ten. If the loser simply put their card at the bottom of their own deck, the game would be flat. It isn’t.

The distinction matters here: the tension is designed, but nobody triggers it. The player isn’t its author — there’s no move that could create it or prevent it. The structure does the work on its own; the player is just present for it. And that answers the question of where the engagement comes from in a game where nobody chooses anything — the tension arrives from the rules, not from decisions.

The decision that sits outside the game

Theory says War ends when one player collects all the cards. Practice says this can take forever — especially when the balance evens out halfway through and the game hits a plateau.

That raises the question of how to honorably end something that won’t close naturally. A timed draw, an agreed pause, counting the cards and accepting the current result — all of this requires negotiation between players. Small negotiations, a small social consensus.

And there’s a paradox worth noting: in a game with not a single decision in it, the players make a decision anyway. Not inside the rules, though — about the rules, deciding when and on what terms to stop following them. The only real choice in War lies outside War.

You can’t throw the game

In many games with children, adults have a tool available: you can gently “help.” Play a weaker card, miss an opening, let yourself be surprised. Formally everything stays within the rules — nobody is cheating, someone is simply playing worse than they can. It’s a way of working around the designed balance from the inside, without breaking anything.

In War, this can’t be done. Not because someone forbade it, but because there’s nothing to do it with. Throwing a game requires a choice you can deliberately make badly — and here there is no choice at all. The absence of decisions takes that tool away from the adult completely.

The consequence runs deeper than it first appears: the child wins for real, or doesn’t win at all. There is no third option — the most common one, where the adult handed over the win in a way that wasn’t meant to show.

Cheating, of course, is still possible — peeking at the top card of your own deck, swapping one when nobody is looking. But that’s plain rule-breaking rather than rule-exploiting. And it has a different quality: it has to stay hidden. There’s no room here for cheating disguised as a legal move, because there are no legal moves to speak of — there is only turning over the top card. When it does happen, it’s a separate and valuable moment: the conversation about why someone wanted to swap a card can be more interesting than the game itself.

The King of Hearts cannot leave

There’s another situation that’s hard to call cheating — because the child isn’t trying to win through deception. They simply don’t want to give up a specific card. The King of Hearts. The Queen with the beautiful crown. The Jack who looks particularly distinguished in this particular deck.

In some decks the pictures really do make a difference — they’re vivid enough to become characters, not cards. And when such a card loses a battle, the child isn’t contesting the outcome strategically. They just don’t want to say goodbye to someone they’ve grown attached to.

This isn’t anarchy and it isn’t cheating — it’s attachment that, for a moment, turned out to be stronger than the rules of the game. But rules are rules, and here something appears that no game designer can resolve: how will the parent respond?

The pressure is real. It’s easier to let it go — allow the child to keep the king, move on, not make a scene. And sometimes that’s the right call. But there’s another option: calm, non-aggressive firmness. A rule exists to work for everyone, not just when the outcome suits us. The King of Hearts loses just like the two of clubs.

That conversation — about how rules don’t yield to our preferences — is one of the harder ones to have. And War, through its randomness, is fair in this regard: nobody took the king from the child deliberately. That’s just how the cards fell.

A loss with nobody to blame

Games with decisions burden the loser twice: you lost and you made a mistake. Every defeat is evidence of something. In War, a loss is pure chance — and that paradoxically makes it a better environment for learning how to handle outcomes.

A loss in War is a loss without alibis and without anyone to blame. There’s nothing to appeal to, no move to question, not even the satisfaction of having been outplayed. There’s a result. And the next round.

One more thing worth noting: War doesn’t favor the older player. A five-year-old and an eight-year-old sit at the same table on exactly equal terms — not because the adults are pretending, but because there is genuinely nothing the older player can do better. This is rare among games, and one of the reasons War is often the first game where a child wins for real.

Comparing values is the whole game

Before anyone can think about strategy, they need to be able to compare values. Which card is higher? Does the Jack beat the ten? What does it mean that the ace is highest? To a new player — usually a child — none of this is obvious; it’s precisely what has to be learned.

War is the purest possible training for that skill — with no noise to distract from it. There are no suits that change anything. No combinations, no sets. Just one number to compare.

But what matters more is how that skill gets practiced. Comparing values here isn’t a task you complete in order to keep playing — it is the whole game. It resolves the round and does nothing else. That’s the exact opposite of an arithmetic problem falling down the screen, where the content is merely a gate to the mechanic, and the mechanic would work identically with any other content. Here nothing can be swapped out: remove the comparison of values and there is no game left.

And this brings out something easy to forget about a game without decisions. War could play itself, but it doesn’t play itself. Someone has to compare the cards, settle who won, count out the cards for a war, sweep up the pile. The player is needed — not for choosing, but for executing the rules. That’s their only job, and it’s enough to count as engagement.

Executing rules as a source of pleasure

This isn’t a quirk of War, or of other simple games. Places where nothing is chosen and yet something is happening exist in games of every weight — including the most demanding ones.

Crafting systems: once the recipe is known and the materials gathered, actually making the item isn’t a decision. It’s a procedure. And yet players return to it willingly — the pleasure is in closing the loop, not in the choice.

The same goes for the whole administrative layer of board games: place the tokens, advance the round track, refill the market. The best example, to my mind, is handling money in economic games — spending and making change across denominations, as in Monopoly. There’s no choice involved: the amount is known, and breaking it into notes is an arithmetic-and-manual task. And yet it can absorb a player quite independently of the game itself — sorting notes by denomination, keeping your own bank in order, the role of banker as a distinct job at the table.

Or rolling dice. Mechanically it’s a random number generator — a computer would produce the number faster and without it rolling under the table. And yet the shaking of the dice in a cupped hand, the way they’re thrown, the superstitions attached to it — all of that exists and is part of the experience.

Setting a game up can be more than preparation, too. In chess it has accumulated both rule and ceremony: the mnemonic for which side the king stands on and which the queen; drawing for colors by hiding two pawns in closed fists. Nobody is making a decision that matters to the game — and yet it’s a recognizable part of playing chess.

Worth noting, too, that not all of this was designed by anyone. The ceremony around a dice roll has no author, and chess didn’t come into being at any single moment — it grew over centuries, and part of its custom attached itself along the way. Nobody wrote these things into the rules, and nobody defended them. They persist.

In none of these cases does the player make a decision. They execute rules — and the execution itself gives something back. War is simply a game made of nothing but that.

What’s missing, and what isn’t

Let’s gather up what remains in a game with every decision stripped out.

The tension remains — designed by the rules, though triggered by nobody. The meeting at the table remains, and the emotion shared with another person. The experience of an outcome that owes nothing to effort remains. The negotiation about when to stop remains — the only real decision in this game, pushed outside its rules. The attachment to the King of Hearts remains, which no designer anticipated. The execution of rules remains, engaging without choosing.

And finally, simply being at the table remains — sitting across from someone, holding cards, flipping the next one, reacting to the result. For anyone just entering the world of games, that isn’t a small thing: when there is nothing to work out, all their attention can go to exactly that.

What doesn’t remain is anything you could call agency.

And there is the conclusion worth drawing, much wider than a deck of cards. Agency is one source of what makes games compelling — probably the strongest, and certainly the most discussed. But it isn’t a condition of something being a game. War is a model, it has clear rules, it is safe, and it is undertaken voluntarily. It contains not a single decision, and it can still absorb a player — not everyone, and not forever, but enough to sustain years of playing. Something, then, must hold a player at the table besides choosing — and if something must, it’s worth knowing what, because it works in games that do have decisions too.

A non-game, then, isn’t the opposite of a game. It’s a game where you can see everything the decisions usually hide.

written August 2026