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.
