There have been plenty to choose from over the years, in different scales and contexts, focusing on various key battles and engagements – so, to make your choice easier, here's our list of Wargamer’s favourite American Civil War digital strategy games. Nevertheless, the conflict's key advances in warfare technology and its epochal importance in US history have made it an endlessly compelling and popular setting for wargames of every format throughout the 20th century, spawning a whole genre of games, many of which are worth your time.

Unsurprisingly, for a war largely fought over whether white people should be allowed to own black people, American Civil War games have at times been a magnet for controversy. It probably also helps that a lot of modern wargame designers are American. Wargame developers love making American Civil War games, drawing on the war's romantic notions of 'brother against brother' and the development of warfare from line battles to quasi-trench warfare slug-fests. Alongside the two World Wars, Napoleon's conquests and the grand imperial conflicts of antiquity, it ranks among the 'most gamed' wars in all of human history.