Board game in the context of "Trictrac"

A figurine (a diminutive form of the word figure) or statuette is a small, three-dimensional sculpture that represents a human, deity or animal, or, in practice, a pair or small group of them. Figurines have been made in many media, with clay, metal, wood, glass, and today plastic or resin the most significant. Ceramic figurines not made of porcelain are called terracottas in historical contexts.

Figures with movable parts, allowing limbs to be posed, are more likely to be called dolls, mannequins, or action figures; or robots or automata, if they can move on their own. Figurines and miniatures are sometimes used in board games, such as chess, and tabletop role playing games.

A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two distinct senses:

1. A competition involving a number of matches, each involving a subset of the competitors, with the overall tournament winner determined based on the combined results of these individual matches.
2. One or more competitions held at a single venue and concentrated into a relatively short time interval.

The first sense is common in sports and games where each match must involve a small number of competitors, often precisely two, as in most competitive team sports, racket sports, combat sports, card games, and board games. Such tournaments allow large numbers to compete against each other in spite of the restriction on numbers in a single match. All golf tournaments meet the second definition, but while match play tournaments also meet the first, stroke play tournaments do not, since there are no distinct matches within such tournaments. In contrast, association football leagues like the Premier League hold tournaments only in the first sense, as matches are spread across many venues over an extended period of time. Many tournaments meet both definitions; for example, the Wimbledon tennis championship.

Chess is a board game for two players. It is an abstract strategy game that involves no hidden information and no elements of chance. It is played on a square board consisting of 64 squares arranged in an 8×8 grid. The players, referred to as "White" and "Black", each control sixteen pieces: one king, one queen, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, and eight pawns, with each type of piece having a different pattern of movement. An enemy piece may be captured (removed from the board) by moving one's own piece onto the square it occupies. The object of the game is to "checkmate" (threaten with inescapable capture) the enemy king. There are also several ways a game can end in a draw.

The recorded history of chess dates back to the emergence of chaturanga in 7th century India. Chaturanga is also thought to be an ancestor of similar games like Janggi, xiangqi and shogi. After its introduction to Persia, it spread to the Arab world and then to Europe. The modern rules of chess emerged in Europe at the end of the 15th century, becoming standardized and gaining universal acceptance by the end of the 19th century. Today, chess is one of the world's most popular games, with millions of players worldwide.

Chaturanga (Sanskrit: चतुरङ्ग, IAST: caturaṅga, pronounced [tɕɐtuˈɾɐŋɡɐ]) is an ancient Indian strategy board game. It is first known from India around the seventh century AD.

While there is some uncertainty, the prevailing view among chess historians is that chaturanga is the common ancestor of the board games chess, xiangqi (Chinese), janggi (Korean), shogi (Japanese), sittuyin (Burmese), makruk (Thai), ouk chatrang (Cambodian) and modern Indian chess. It was adopted as chatrang (shatranj) in Sassanid Persia, which in turn was the form of chess brought to late-medieval Europe.

A game board (or gameboard; sometimes, playing board or game map) is the surface on which one plays a board game.

The oldest known game boards may date to Neolithic times; however, some scholars argue these may not have been game boards at all. Early Bronze Age artifacts are more universally recognized as game boards (for games such as Egyptian senet and mehen, and the Mesopotamian Royal Game of Ur). Most ancient board games were race games, utilizing random outcome generators like dice.

A card game is any game that uses cards as the primary device with which the game is played, whether the cards are of a traditional design or specifically created for the game (proprietary). Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card games played with traditional decks have formally standardized rules with international tournaments being held, but most are folk games whose rules may vary by region, culture, location or from circle to circle.

Traditional card games are played with a deck or pack of playing cards which are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. Normally the backs of the cards are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards may all be unique, or there can be duplicates. The composition of a deck is known to each player. In some cases several decks are shuffled together to form a single pack or shoe. Modern card games usually have bespoke decks, often with a vast amount of cards, and can include number or action cards. This type of game is colloquially regarded as part of the broader "board game" hobby.

A toy or plaything is an object that is used primarily to provide entertainment. Simple examples include toy blocks, board games, and dolls. Toys are often designed for use by children, although many are designed specifically for adults and pets. Toys can provide utilitarian benefits, including physical exercise, cultural awareness, or academic education. Additionally, utilitarian objects, especially those which are no longer needed for their original purpose, can be used as toys. Examples include children building a fort with empty cereal boxes and tissue paper spools, or a toddler playing with a broken TV remote. The term "toy" can also be used to refer to utilitarian objects purchased for enjoyment rather than need, or for expensive necessities for which a large fraction of the cost represents its ability to provide enjoyment to the owner, such as luxury cars, high-end motorcycles, gaming computers, and flagship smartphones.

Playing with toys can be an enjoyable way of training young children for life experiences. Various materials, such as wood, clay, paper, and plastic, are used to make toys. Newer forms of toys include interactive digital entertainment and smart toys. Some toys are produced primarily as collector's items and are intended for display only.

The Spiel des Jahres (German: [ˈʃpiːl dəs ˈjaːʁəs], 'Game of the Year') is an award for board and card games, created in 1978 with the purpose of rewarding family-friendly game design and promoting excellent games in the German market. It is thought that the existence and popularity of the award was one of the major drivers of the quality of games coming out of Germany, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. A Spiel des Jahres nomination can increase the typical sales of a game from 500–3,000 copies to around 10,000, and the winner can usually expect to sell as many as 500,000 copies.

Senet or senat (Ancient Egyptian: 𓊃𓈖𓏏𓏠, romanized: znt, lit. 'passing'; cf. Coptic ⲥⲓⲛⲉ /sinə/, 'passing, afternoon') is a board game from ancient Egypt that consists of ten or more pawns on a 30-square playing board. The earliest representation of senet is dated to c. 2620 BCE from the Mastaba of Hesy-Re, while similar boards and hieroglyphic signs are found even earlier, including in the Levant in the Early Bronze Age II period. Even though the game has a 2,000-year history in Egypt, there appears to be very little variation in terms of key components. This can be determined by studying the various senet boards that have been found by archaeologists, as well as depictions of senet being played throughout Egyptian history on places like tomb walls and papyrus scrolls. However, the game fell out of use during the Roman period, and its original rules are the subject of conjecture.

Educational games are games explicitly designed with educational purposes, or which have incidental or secondary educational value. All types of games may be used in an educational environment, however educational games are games that are designed to help people learn about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand a historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play. Game types include board, card, and video games.

As educators, governments, and parents realize the psychological need and benefits that gaming has on learning, this educational tool has become mainstream. Games are interactive play that teach goals, rules, adaptation, problem solving, interaction, all represented as a story. They satisfy a fundamental need to learn by providing enjoyment, passionate involvement, structure, motivation, ego gratification, adrenaline, creativity, social interaction and emotion in the game itself while the learning takes place.

In machine learning, deep learning focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience and revolves around stacking artificial neurons into layers and "training" them to process data. The adjective "deep" refers to the use of multiple layers (ranging from three to several hundred or thousands) in the network. Methods used can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.

Some common deep learning network architectures include fully connected networks, deep belief networks, recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks, transformers, and neural radiance fields. These architectures have been applied to fields including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine translation, bioinformatics, drug design, medical image analysis, climate science, material inspection and board game programs, where they have produced results comparable to and in some cases surpassing human expert performance.

Blokus (/ˈblɒkəs/ BLOK-əs) is an abstract strategy board game for two to four players, where players try to score points by occupying most of the board with pieces of their colour. The board is a square regular grid and the pieces are polyominoes. It was designed by French mathematician Bernard Tavitian and first released in 2000 by Sekkoïa, a French company. It has won several awards, including the Mensa Select award and the 2004 Teacher's Choice Award. In 2009, the game was sold to Mattel.

Monopoly is a multiplayer economics-themed board game. In the game, players roll two dice (or 1 extra special red die depending on the game) to move around the game board, buying and trading properties and developing them with houses and hotels. Players collect rent from their opponents and aim to drive them into bankruptcy. Money can also be gained or lost through Chance and Community Chest cards and tax squares. Players receive a salary every time they pass "Go" and can end up in jail, from which they cannot move until they have met one of three conditions. House rules, hundreds of different editions, many spin-offs, and related media exist.

Monopoly has become a part of international popular culture, having been licensed locally in more than 113 countries and printed in more than 46 languages. As of 2015, it was estimated that the game had sold 275 million copies worldwide. The properties on the original game board were named after locations in and around Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Tabletop games or tabletops are games that are normally played on a table or other flat surface, such as board games, card games, dice games, miniature wargames, tabletop role-playing games, or tile-based games.

This glossary of board games explains commonly used terms in board games, in alphabetical order. For a list of board games, see List of board games; for terms specific to chess, see Glossary of chess; for terms specific to chess problems, see Glossary of chess problems.

A chess variant is any board game related to, derived from, or inspired by orthodox chess. Chess variants can differ from standard chess in many different ways, including variant board sizes, non-standard fairy pieces, alternative starting positions, and additional rules. There are thousands of known chess variants (see list of chess variants). The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants catalogues around two thousand, with the preface noting that—since creating a chess variant is relatively easy—many were considered insufficiently notable for inclusion. While most chess variants are not widely played, some have reached modest levels of popularity, with the most successful being Chess960. Several well known modern chess masters like Capablanca, Fischer, and Yasser Seirewan developed their own chess variants.

"Classical", "orthodox" or "Western" chess itself is one of a family of games which have related origins and could be considered part of the same board game family. Modern chess itself developed from the Indian chaturanga via the Middle-eastern shatranj. During the Middle Ages, there were numerous popular chess variants, like Great chess and Courier chess. Modern chess variants are mostly all variations on standard Western chess. Though not technically variants of modern chess, there are also many regional games which are part of the same family, such as shogi (Japan), sittuyin (Burma), makruk (Thailand), hiashatar (Mongolia), and xiangqi (China). These games have their own history of variants (see shogi variants and xianqi variants).