Fundamentals of Game Design, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Strategy Games

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.

—WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Strategy games are among the oldest in the world. Tradition puts the invention of Go at around 2200 BC. The Royal Game of Ur, whose board and counters are on display in the British Museum in London, dates to around 2500 BC, although nobody knows what the rules were—it might only have been a game of chance.

This chapter discusses how the principles of game design apply to strategy games, concentrating on the most popular subgenre, war games. It begins with a formal definition of strategy games and then addresses in detail the ...