[mwfunk]

In my experience, for a lot of people who are into them, the term "wargame" implicitly means old-school Avalon Hill-style hex-and-counter board wargames. The same people would just refer to miniatures games like Little Wars as "miniatures games", but out of convenience rather than ignorance.

Pedantically, they should be calling them "board wargames" and "miniatures wargames", but the terminology somehow got simplified to "wargames" and "miniatures games". Mechanically the two genres can be very similar though, if not identical.

[walshemj]

Actually at least in the UK its the inverse "wargame" tends to be applied to games with figures the AH type of game would be lumped in as a board game.