European Historical Game Studies is an international, non-profit, open-access, peer-reviewed journal of academic game studies. Our mission is to publish high-quality empirical and theoretical research on games on all platforms, digital and nondigital, as long as their themes include European histories and heritages. In particular, we wish to provide a platform for historical game researchers from those regions and countries in Europe which are underrepresented in international Game Studies. The language of the journal is English. 

In general, we are interested in research on games that represent historical settings and/or engage with cultural heritage of European nations, peoples, communities, etc. This includes:

  • games designed to represent a historical past or simulate historical processes
  • games created in the past to represent a then-present reality 
  • alternate histories, counterfactual history, and historical fiction in games
  • games based on European cultural heritage, including legends and mythologies

EHGS is an interdisciplinary journal, open to all disciplines and methods relevant to the study of history/heritage-themed games: history, art history, heritage studies, historical fiction studies, historical education, narratology, media studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ethnography, cultural studies, political science, etc. Nonetheless, we are situated in the field of Historical Game Studies, so we expect our authors to engage with state-of-the-art HGS and GS literature. We are not interested in papers that study historical games entirely outside the scope of HGS, such as archaeological research on chess or hnefatafl games as found artefacts, or museological papers on early video games framed as media heritage.


EHGS is published online and in print by the Faculty of History, University of Gdansk, Poland. The journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The online version is available in open access on the https://czasopisma.bg.ug.edu.pl/ platform. The print version is published as one volume per year, which may consist of one or more issues released online.

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