Introduction

This is an article I have been wanting to write for the longest time. At Strategy and Wargaming, we all know that History and video games go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly, chocolate and vanilla, and blue over gold. There are thousands of Historical games, and the setting isn’t getting old anytime soon, with recent releases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Europa Universalis 5 topping out the sales charts of 2025. I, too, am a fan of historical games, which is the main reason this website exists.

With the recent success of my 10 famous historical myths list, and with over 25 years of experience playing history-related titles under my belt, I wanted to share my 10 tips for enjoying historical video games to the fullest.

10 – Learn A Little Bit Of Real History First

Let’s start this one out with the most obvious if you want to achieve peak immersion while playing some of the best historical games of all time. To make the best and fully enjoy historical titles, you need to learn a little bit about History first. Obvious, right? While it can work the other way around as well, in the sense that games can be the ones teaching you more about History, if you’re looking to enjoy the titles more, there’s nothing like knowing a thing or two about what’s going on. Now, you don’t need to go insano-style and try to memorize every single ruler of a dynasty, or all the important dates of a historical event, but getting a bird’s eye view of what took place will give that satisfying feeling of being able to recognize certain events, places, and people. This can extend to things like military equipment, tactics, and factions.

9 – Learn About Geography

History isn’t just an abstract concept of things that have gone by. Far from it, and it might surprise you to know how some people (historians too!) forget the fact that History took place in actual, physical places. It’s a truly fascinating topic, but one for another time. As for video games, all of them must take place in some physical”, and that can take several forms: from maps of a country, a region, a city, a small town, a forest, a battlefield, you name it, you can find every scale imaginable. If you want to make the most of your historical gaming sessions, it’s important to understand how geography has influenced resources, demographics, economic opportunities, and the outcome of wars, and how it shaped the destiny of billions. This will help you formulate strategies and be successful a lot more often.

8 – Accept Historical Inaccuracies

No video game will ever be able to replicate real-life as it really was, and for several reasons. The first and most obvious is that we just don’t have enough historical sources for most of human history, and whatever we do have are but brief snapshots of how life might have been, how events might have unfolded, and how people might have felt. This feeling of uncertainty only gets worse the further we go back. While we do have a lot of documentation for historical events like World War 2, possibly the most used scenario in gaming, ever (even first-hand accounts from people who fought there and are still alive to this day), the same cannot be said for events that took place in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries. Enter the age of sail, and we barely have any surviving ships. Go back even further to the medieval ages, and History starts to look more like a mantle that’s missing a lot of patches.

This isn’t to say games should not attempt to be historically authentic if they so wish to; they should. All I’m saying is to look at a historical title for what it is, a video game. Is Europa Universalis 5 perfect? No, but it does a great job of simulating things like demographic fluctuation and its impact on the systems of governance and economics. Is Graviteam Tactics: Mius Front irreproachable, even if its one of the best World War 2 games ever? No, but it will do a damn good job of showcasing to you the scale and hardships of combat on the Eastern Front. Is Rome: Total War 2 the most realistic depiction of Roman politics? Of course not, but it shone a spotlight on Roman history as no book or movie had done before. Battlefield 1? Equally as valuable, if it most things wrong.

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