[MoriartyL]

But there's plenty of "multitasking" and "strategic thinking" in a typical simulation, too! And anything but the most abstract strategy game is simulating something in reality, whether that's warfare or something else.

And do simulations really have to be tied to reality? I once played a demo for "Evil Genius", an evil lair simulation. That was factual in no way, shape or form. And there are science-fiction simulations, where you travel through space trading things. These games are not efforts to capture reality, so they're not at all similar to non-fictional books. And yet we call them simulation games!

By the way, the way Wikipedia describes Total War (I've never played it.) makes it sound an awful lot like strategy board games. So your suggestion that it's part-simulation just reinforces the idea that strategy board games and simulation videogames are identical except for the element of competition.