Wargames have a long history of use as tools for training and educating decision makers and illuminating the strategic problems of war and warfare. Recent calls for re-invigoration of wargaming culture in the Department of Defense (DoD) suggest some value in a return to first principles, asking and answering the question what use wargames have. This discussion verifies the commonly-helped notions that wargames are useful for training, education, and exploratory analysis or hypothesis generation. It also argues the common belief that wargames are unsuitable for the purpose of hypothesis testing is false.