Avalon Hill was a game company that specialized in wargame and strategic board games. It also published the occasional miniature wargaming rules, role-playing game, and had a popular line of sports simulations. It is now a division of the game company Wizards of the Coast, which is itself a subsidiary of Hasbro.
The company was started in 1958 by Charles S. Roberts following the success of his wargame Tactics. With Tactics, Roberts created a new type of board game based on actual war-like scenarios and strategies. This sort of game had previously existed (H. G. Wells had written a set of rules called Little Wars), but they had mainly used miniature figures and modeled 3D terrain (like that found in model railroad).
Avalon Hill pioneered many of the concepts of modern recreational wargaming. These include elements such as the use of a hexagon grid (aka hexgrid) overlaid on a flat folding board, zones of control (ZOC), stacking of multiple units at a location, an odds-based combat...
