The history of strategy games starts on a kitchen table in Maryland, not in a computer lab. A veteran named Charles Roberts wanted a better way to argue about military tactics, so he built one out of cardboard in 1952. Seventy years later his descendants fill arenas in Seoul and eat commutes in Ohio.

That line runs straighter than most people expect. Almost every major shift in the genre came from someone solving a dull technical problem, and the solution stuck around long after the problem went away. Here is how the form got from paper hexes to ranked ladders.

It Started With Cardboard and a Square Grid

Roberts designed Tactics in 1952 to sharpen his odds at a military career, then started selling it out of Avalon, Maryland, in 1954. By 1958 the side business had a name, Avalon Hill, and a sequel called Tactics II.

The famous hexagon showed up later. Tactics ran on a square grid, which is a lousy way to model movement because a diagonal step covers more ground than a straight one. Roberts saw hex boards during a visit to the Rand Corporation, worked out that six equal neighbors beat eight unequal ones, and put hexes on the map in the 1961 second edition of Gettysburg. Wargaming had found its unit of measurement and kept it for the next forty years.

What Avalon Hill actually sold was an argument: that a war is a system with rules you can learn, and that learning them is fun. Every strategy game since has been a fight over which rules matter.

Computers Got Wargames Before They Got Graphics

Walter Bright wrote Empire on a PDP-10 mainframe at Caltech in 1977, and it did the thing mainframes were good at. It tracked hundreds of units across a large map and let up to eight players push them around. No art, barely an interface, and it still ran for years because the system underneath held up.

The commercial version arrived in 1980, when Strategic Simulations shipped Computer Bismarck as the first commercial computer wargame at sixty dollars a copy, roughly four times the going rate. It was turn-based, and so was everything else, because a processor that draws a map one tile at a time cannot also fight a battle in real time.

The turn was a hardware constraint before it was a design choice. That is worth remembering the next time somebody calls turn-based play old-fashioned, and our breakdown of the turn-based form covers where that lineage went after the constraint lifted.

Dune II Wrote the Template Everyone Copied

Sega’s Herzog Zwei put real-time unit command on a Genesis cartridge in 1989 and almost nobody built on it. Westwood did. Virgin handed the studio a Dune license and pointed at Herzog Zwei as the model, and in December 1992 Dune II shipped with the pieces still in use today. Harvest a resource, spend it on buildings, let buildings open new units, take map control, repeat until the other side stops.

Producer Brett Sperry needed a phrase that would separate his game from the turn-based shelf, so he coined real-time strategy. One of the largest genres in gaming got its name from a marketing problem. Our guide to the real-time form traces the mechanical line running forward from that release.

The Nineties Belonged to Real-Time Strategy

Warcraft landed in 1994, Command and Conquer in 1995, StarCraft in 1998, and for about a decade the RTS was what people meant when they said strategy game. The formula tightened fast. Blizzard built factions that played genuinely differently instead of swapping art on the same units. Westwood built sidebar production and full-motion video that was gloriously, memorably bad. Age of Empires split the difference in 1997 by wrapping the same loop around real history, which turned out to be the most durable packaging of the three.

Most of those classics are playable now. The Command and Conquer Remastered Collection cleaned up the first two games without sanding off what made them work, and the console tactics that grew up alongside the boom are still worth emulating. The rest of the real-time catalog has since moved in directions the nineties would not recognize.

Korea Turned Strategy Into a Spectator Sport

StarCraft: Brood War did something no design document predicted. It became televised sport in South Korea, with professional leagues, sponsored teams, and a competitive record that Liquipedia has maintained ever since. Strategy became something you could watch without playing, which is the moment the genre stopped being a hobby and started being an industry.

The custom map scene mattered even more. Warcraft III shipped with a map editor, that editor produced Defense of the Ancients, and the MOBA grew out of that mod into the most-played competitive form on the planet. A different corner of the same editor produced the first tower defense maps. Two of the biggest genres of the last fifteen years were built by hobbyists inside somebody else’s RTS.

Paradox Made Complexity the Product

While the rest of the industry simplified for a wider audience, Paradox Interactive went the other way. Crusader Kings arrived in April 2004 and asked players to run a medieval dynasty through inheritance law and marriage politics, which is not a pitch anyone writes on a whiteboard.

It worked because the audience existed and nobody was serving it. Crusader Kings III shipped in September 2020 to the biggest launch the studio had seen, and Europa Universalis V followed in November 2025. The lesson took two decades to land. A strategy audience will read the manual if the system underneath it is honest, and the same appetite runs through the turn-based side of the shelf.

Then Mobile Ate Everything

Clash of Clans launched in 2012 and out-earned the entire nineties RTS boom several times over. It also changed what the word strategy means on a store page. Base layout and troop composition are real decisions with real depth behind them. Waiting six hours for a barracks timer is not a decision at all.

Something better came out of the same wave. Tower defense, born in those Warcraft III custom maps, found its natural home on touchscreens where one finger places a tower and the math handles the rest. The evolution of strategy games on mobile has been messy, but it produced serious design work alongside the timer economies.

What the History of Strategy Games Tells You About Right Now

Strategy game history is not a clean line of improvement. It is a record of constraints. Hexes solved a movement problem. Turns solved a processor problem. Real-time solved a marketing problem. Free-to-play solved a distribution problem, badly.

So pick by the constraint you actually enjoy. Want the pure Avalon Hill inheritance? Play hex wargames and grid tactics, where the whole system sits on the table in front of you. Want the Dune II machine? Play an RTS and accept that your hands are part of the skill. Want the Paradox deal? Clear a weekend and read the tooltips. Want fifteen minutes on a train? Mobile has finally earned some of your attention.

Strategygame.org keeps the full spread covered, and this year’s releases are the fastest way to see which branch of the family is healthiest right now.

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