Board Games

From WIN-ipedia - information and strategies about winning

Introduction

A board game is a game played with counters, pieces or other tokens that are placed on, moved across, or removed from a "board". One way of defining board games are between those based upon luck and strategy. Some games, such as chess, have no luck involved. Children's games tend to be very luck based, with games such as Sorry! or snakes and ladders having virtually no decisions to be made. Most board games have both luck and strategy. A player may be hampered by a few poor rolls of the dice in Backgammon, Risk or Monopoly, but over many games a player with a superior strategy will win more often.

Luck is introduced to a game by a number of methods. The most popular is using dice. These can determine everything from how many steps a player moves their token, as in Monopoly, how their forces fare in battle, such as in Risk, or which resources a player gains. Other games such as Sorry! use a deck of special cards that when shuffled create randomness. Scrabble does something similar with randomly picked letters. Some games use spinners, timers of random length, or other sources of randomness. Trivia games have a great deal of randomness based on which question a person gets.

Many board games are now available as computer games, including the option to have the computer act as an opponent. With the Internet, many board games can now be played online against a computer or other players. Some web sites allow play in real time and immediately show the opponent's moves.

Common terms

Throughout the world of the board game there is a generalized terminology to describe most concepts:

• Game board (or board) — the surface on which one plays a board game.
• Game piece (or token or bit) — a player's representative on the game board. Each player may control one or more game pieces. In some games that involve commanding multiple game pieces, such as chess, certain pieces have unique designations and capabilities within the parameters of the game; in others, such as Go, all pieces controlled by a player have the same essential capabilities.
• Jump — to bypass one or more game pieces and/or spaces. Depending on the context, jumping may also involve capturing or conquering an opponent's game piece.
• Space (or square) — a physical unit of progress on a gameboard, most often a square element marked into the sruface of the board and delimited by a distinct border.