The War casino game is challenging enough for adults to enjoy

A lot of things may start out as simple children's play but end up getting bigger, with its appeal spanning across ages and generations. Take the case of the card game War. With its basic and uncomplicated game play, it appeals primarily to children, but versions appealing to adults have actually been coming out, especially in the mobile format, and the War casino game is in fact available.

The original game premise is simple and uses a standard deck of cards. Two or more players may join in, and the deck is dealt equally to each one face down. The players place their individual face-down stacks in front of them. The game starts with each player taking his top-most card from his stack and placing it face up. Whoever has the highest rank (note that the suit is irrelevant) gets all the played cards and places these face-down at the bottom of his stack. When the cards are of equal rank, a war ensues and each player gets two more cards from his deck. The first is placed face-down with the first played card, and the second is again faced up and played against the others. Whoever has the highest card wins all the played cards, including the ones placed face down. If the cards are again of equal rank, the cycle is repeated until a higher card emerges. The objective is to win all the cards by the end of the game. When a player runs out of cards in the middle of a war, he may immediately lose the game, or continue playing with just his last card, whatever is agreed upon as a game rule.

To spice things up a bit and thereby appeal to an older crowd, several rule and play variations have been introduced.

Some of the versions include the Strategy War, wherein each player is dealt a hand (the number of cards per hand may vary) and he gets to pick which of his card he plays with in each round. There is also the War casino game where a player goes against the house, and real money is involved. Still another version is Simple Math for when three players are in the game. When the winning card is higher still than the the sum of the two other played cards, the winner gets not just the played cards but also the next face-down card from each of the stack of the losing players.

So whether you want to wager with real stakes at the War casino game or you just want to hone your playing and mathematical skills, a variation is likely out there.