[ELI5]How do war games work? How do you get points or win?
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“Wargame” is a very wide term, so the answer is that they vary a lot in how they work.
The defining feature is at least *some* degree of similarity to how war works in real life (or in some imagined setting). So even though chess is a game and have *some* things in common with a real war, it wouldn’t generally be classed as a wargame.
Some wargames are very stylised and streamlined, aiming to capture only a couple of key aspects of a real scenario. Some are extremely detailed, trying to simulate as much as possible about a particular area of warfare as realistically as possible.
Real-world militaries will sometimes play wargames with referees and very loose rules, where each turn players can argue to do anything that’s plausibly possible. They also carry out in-the-field exercises that are called wargames – for example using laser weapons to determine hits, or simply practising manoeuvres and tactics without an opponent (the latter, of course, can’t really be classed as a “game”, but it sometimes called a wargame).
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