Playing War
Two sides with toy weapons over agreed ground: they run, hide and call shots that only the target can concede.
Playing war has no ball, no markings and no score, and the whole of it rests on people's word. The shot is notional, the hit invisible, and only the person hit can concede it.
So the hard part of playing war is not getting your opponent in your sights but coming to an agreement. Who fired first, whether the target was in view, whether a shot around a corner counts — all of it is settled aloud on the spot.
Why it is agreed in advance
An argument in the middle of an exchange stops the game dead: both sides stand out in the open working out who got whom. So experienced companies spend their first minutes not on positions but on conditions.
Three things are settled: where the boundaries run, what counts as a , and how a player shows that they are . Everything else the game works out as it goes.
Toy Weapon
Under these rules: Safe only: plastic, foam or purely notional. Nothing hard and nothing thrown is used here.
A toy that stands in for a shot — or empty hands and a voice instead of one.
A plastic gun, a stick, a blaster firing soft darts. The game is also played with nothing at all, the shot called out aloud: either way it is the target who concedes the hit.
The rules of playing war
Setting up
The players divide into two sides and agree the boundaries of the ground: where the game runs and where nobody goes.
They also agree what counts as a hit, and how a player signals it: by sitting down, raising a hand, or stepping outside the boundary.
Weapons
Play uses safe toy weapons, or no object at all, the shot being called aloud. Firing anything hard, throwing anything, and aiming at the face are out under any agreement.
Play
After the start the sides move freely over the ground: hiding, working round, giving chase, laying ambushes.
The aim is to be first to a called hit on an opponent.
A disputed exchange
A simultaneous hit, where both sides believe they fired first, is settled by whichever way was agreed: both count as down, or the exchange is played again.
Settling a dispute mid-game with no rule agreed in advance is a sure way to end the game.
The end
Playing war has no standing end condition. It is played either openly with no overall score, or in rounds: until one side is entirely out, until a notional objective is taken, or until an appointed time runs out.
Worth knowing
This game has no lives, no way back in and no score by default — companies appoint all of that themselves or go without. Its one genuinely open point is the simultaneous hit: there is no common answer to it, and it must be agreed before the start, or the argument will stop the game.
Glossary of terms
- Down
- The state of a player who has conceded a hit: they leave the exchange in whatever way was agreed.
- Hit
- A called shot that the target has conceded. Who does the conceding is agreed before the game.