we played a lot of card games too. our version of War was very simple, you dealt the whole deck out to every person who wanted to play and any odd cards were put in the middle for the winner of the first trick. for an element of mystery nobody (including the winner of the trick) could look at the cards that were face down.
tricks were played by everyone flipping over a card and whoever had the highest card won the trick. in the case of ties you kept flipping cards until someone won the trick.
one variation we did to make it possible to steal another person's highest value card you would after a tie put the following card face down on the trick and then turn another card so that way you could win an otherwise impossible card from someone.
a very simple game.