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 checkerboard (American English) or chequerboard (British English) is a game board of checkered pattern on which checkers (also known as English draughts) is played. Most commonly, it consists of 64 squares (8×8) of alternating dark and light color, typically green and buff (official tournaments), black and red (consumer commercial), or black and white (printed diagrams). An 8×8 checkerboard is used to play many other games, including chess, whereby it is known as a chessboard. Other rectangular square-tiled boards are also often called checkerboards. In The Netherlands, however, a dambord (checker board) has 10 rows and 10 columns for 100 squares in total (see article International draughts).
In geometry, a square is a regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal sides. As with all rectangles, a square's angles are right angles (90 degrees, or π/2 radians), making adjacent sides perpendicular. The area of a square is the side length multiplied by itself, and so in algebra, multiplying a number by itself is called squaring.
Equal squares can tile the plane edge-to-edge in the square tiling. Square tilings are ubiquitous in tiled floors and walls, graph paper, image pixels, and game boards. Square shapes are also often seen in building floor plans, origami paper, food servings, in graphic design and heraldry, and in instant photos and fine art.
A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects (game pieces) that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the term "board game" are between the 1840s and 1850s.
While game boards are a necessary and sufficient condition of this genre, card games that do not use a standard deck of cards, as well as games that use neither cards nor a game board, are often colloquially included, with some referring to this genre generally as "table and board games" or simply "tabletop games".
A chessboard is a game board used to play chess. It consists of 64 squares, 8 rows by 8 columns, on which the chess pieces are placed. It is square in shape and uses two colors of squares, one light and one dark, in a checkered pattern. During play, the board is oriented such that each player's near-right corner square is a light square.
The columns of a chessboard are known as files, the rows are known as ranks, and the lines of adjoining same-colored squares (each running from one edge of the board to an adjacent edge) are known as diagonals. Each square of the board is named using algebraic, descriptive, or numeric chess notation; algebraic notation is the FIDE standard. In algebraic notation, using White's perspective, files are labeled a through h from left to right, and ranks are labeled 1 through 8 from bottom to top; each square is identified by the file and rank that it occupies. The a- through d-files constitute the queenside, and the e- through h-files constitute the kingside; the 1st through 4th ranks constitute White's side, and the 5th through 8th ranks constitute Black's side.