Board game

A board game is a game usually played with pieces on a board, or some area with marked spaces.

Most board games use pieces that may be moved, placed, or traded depending on the rules of the game. These pieces may be money, chips, pawns, or other objects. Board games may often involve some random chance with dice or cards. There are many board games with a long history in some cultures. Examples of these games are chess, checkers, backgammon, parqués, and go. There are also a great number of popular board games that have been created more recently, in the past hundred years. Among these games are Scrabble, Monopoly and Sorry!.^[1]

Chess, and most versions of checkers, are played on a 8x8 square board with 32 white squares and 32 black squares. International checkers is played on a 10x10 square board.^[2]

Older than chess, but not by much, is tafl (pronounced 'tabl'), later called "hneftafl". This is an old Norse board game with just two types of pieces.^[3][4] Its pieces, when found in Britain, have often been wrongly ascribed to chess. In chess, of course, the board is different, and there are six kinds of pieces.

1. ↑ They get initial capitals because they are propriety names, not common names.
2. ↑ "International Checkers Rules". Retrieved 2015-02-25.
3. ↑ Murray H.J.R. 1913. A history of chess, p445, Hnefatafl. Oxford University Press.
4. ↑ Murray H.J.R. 1951. A history of board games other than chess, p56 et seq: Tafl and hnefatafl.