Game Jargon Definition: “Game Board”

Game Board (noun) - game board /ɡām bôrd/

By modern standards, a game board is a portable surface on which players may place game components (e.g., counters, cards, chips, coins, cubes, tokens). Throughout the course of the game, players will then move these pieces on the board, in order to both change and reflect the current state of the game, according to the rules of play. Historically, some game “boards” were less portable, as there is evidence that soldiers would use their weapons or other tools to carve game boards into the stone of battlements that they were charged with patrolling. The life of a soldier was often boring, after all. Today, there are still stationary game boards to be found, typically in the form of chess boards in municipal parks.

Modern game boards are made out of a range of different materials, including cardboard, paper, cloth, neoprene, vinyl, plastic, and wood. In addition, some modern game boards are modular, in that smaller elements (often hexagons, or groupings of hexagons) are shuffled by the players and then assembled in the middle of a table to create a unique pattern on which the game is played. This serves to add unpredictability and replayability to a game.