Continuous game - Definition and Overview

A continuous game, or real-time game, is a game without pauses, turns, rounds, or other stopping points.

The term is most often used to describe video games, which as of the late 1990s were almost all real-time, the shift being driven by the rapid increase in the power of personal computers. There are however a number of board games and card games that are continuous, partially in reaction to the format's popularity in video games.

The relatively new video game genre known as real-time strategy modified traditional strategy games in a way that brought public attention to the differences between real-time and turn-based games.

Examples of some continuous games are the video games Command and Conquer, Red Alert, StarCraft, and Age of Empires, the card game Falling, and the board game Icehouse.

Compare turn-based game.