A snowball fight is a physical game in which balls of snow are thrown with the intention of hitting somebody else. The game is similar to dodgeball in its major factors, though typically less organized. This activity is primarily played during winter when there is sufficient snowfall. Two examples of organized games involving snowball fights are Yukigassen and SheenAab Jung. Yukigassen (雪合戦) is a snowball fighting-competition from Japan. SheenAab Jung (aka 'Snow Fighting') is played in Jammu and Kashmir of India. History Legal prohibition In 1472, the city council of Amsterdam allegedly prohibited snowball fights for reasons of public safety, a prohibition which occasionally finds its way into lists of strange laws. The law, if it ever existed, is not presently enforced. Several localities have passed ordinances prohibiting snowball fights, typically as part of a larger prohibition on thrown missiles. In 2018, the town council of Severance, Colorado unanimously overturned one such ban after hearing from a local youth. Similarly, after its "snowball ordinance" became the subject of national news coverage, the city of Wausau, Wisconsin chose to remove the word "snowball" from a list of dangerous objects specifically prohibited from being thrown on public property. Large snowball fights During the American Civil War, on January 29, 1863, the largest military snow exchange occurred in the Rappahannock Valley in Northern Virginia. What began as a few hundred men from Texas plotting a friendly fight against their Arkansas camp mates soon escalated into a brawl that involved 9,000 soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. In his memoir of the American Civil War, Samuel H. Sprott describes a snowball battle that occurred early in 1864 involving the Army of Tennessee. Sprott states that the fight started when Strahl’s Brigade was attacked by a brigade of Breckenridge’s Division, but soon other brigades became involved, and ultimately five or six thousand men were engaged. On January 29, 2005, a crowd of 3,027 people gathered in the town of Wauconda, Illinois for a snowball fight organized by Bill Lutz, with the town receiving a mention in the 2006 Guinness Book of World Records. On October 14, 2009, 5,768 people in Leuven, Belgium took part in a University of Pennsylvania-funded snowball fight and broke the world record for the largest snowball fight. On December 9, 2009, an estimated crowd of over 4,000 students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison participated in a snowball fight on Bascom