An interactive monte-carlo simulation for the simple card game WAR!
If you don’t know what the card game WAR is, read this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_(card_game)
After playing the simple card game with my 7-year-old daughter, I had several questions. Questions like, how long does a typical game last? How often do you get a WAR (tie)? How often do you get a double WAR? Can you ever have an unending game? I decided to write a program to find answers to these questions.
Also, I’ve never used GitHub before, but I’ve heard this is the place to host your code, so I thought I might as well try it out.
##Answers
I've found the answers to my questions. See all my results here
| Questions | Answers |
|---|---|
| How long does a game last? | About 270 turns. That's the average at least - see the probability distribution below. |
| How often do you get a WAR? | About 6 every 100 turns. |
| How often do you get a double war? | About 3 every 1000 turns. |
| Can you have an unending game? | YES, but only if the players don't mix up any cards won after a turn. |
| How often are there unending games? | About a *tenth of all games are unending. |
*A tenth of all games are unending assuming you are very careful not to mix up or shuffle any cards won after every turn. Of course this is unlikely.
##Building
Open the kbWar.sln file in Visual Studio 2010 and build the project.
It should also work in later versions of Visual Studio, but I haven't tested it.