Wargames

Wargames in the modern, commercial sense have been in existence since the late 1950s, when The Avalon Hill Game Company was formed. Commercial board wargaming began with a game called Tactics II. Games were generally operational in scope, until the early 1970s when tactical and even man-to-man wargames began to be produced.

The so-called "golden age" of wargaming was in the late 1970s to the 1980s, when many new game companies and magazine publishers were producing en masse for a rapidly growing hobby. Simulations Canada emerged in 1977 as a serious entry in the new industry.

The growth of commercial board wargaming had competition in role-playing games, but also by the advent of not just console video games, which had their renaissance in the 1980s, but the rise of microcomputers and personal computers, which became more powerful and better suited to handling the types of computations and calculations necessary to run a challenging board wargame. Additionally, despite the existence of solitaire titles in the board wargaming industry, most computer games were designed with an artificial intelligence capable of playing well against a human. The appeal of online gaming against other humans also opened up as the Internet gained in popularity.

This Category will examine all types of wargames in which the Canadian Army is represented.