A genre of games focused around commandeering small units to destroy each other. The ultimate wargame would be chess, a mix of deadly combat and competition defined by a balanced set or rule. This is a mix that fascinates the regular human being through all time.
Classic wargaming as a popular leisure activity, was emerging around the 1960s, with the increased amount of spare time, recreational wargaming became a widespread activity in Britain and the US. The traditional wargames have been a series of boardgames dealing with historical battles with emphasis on realistic rules.
The playpieces come in different scales ranging from 54 to 2 mm high figures, full of details and carefully painted to look realistic for the specific historical era. A fair amount of the time spent on wargaming are spent on the production of the playpieces and the terrain models. The gameplay are being done in turns by the players, each turn consisting of different phases. The initial setup of all pieces are done(often in accordance to a historic battle), and then movement and attacks follows in turns. The outcome of the fighting are decided using millimeter rulers, a specific rulebook and a set of dices for making realistic random results. A large battle with more than two players can typically take about a day to complete.
With the PC, wargaming have evolved into computer simulations of the two-dimensional boardgames, the results having various resemblance of the originals. Wargaming titles are either turn based like Panzer General II, or built as real-time strategy like C&C or Close Combat.
Epochs of interest are WWI, WWII, US Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars, being the most popular ones. There are also a group of wargames with fantasy and sci-fi universes, very much like role playing.