Printable Classic Game Boards

Boards you can play on tonight

These are not templates to design a game on; that is the board game template page. These are the real boards, the ones the games are played on, drawn at the size a sheet of paper allows and with the details that matter: the star points on a Go board, the numbered points on Backgammon, the diagonals that make Twelve Men's Morris a different game from Nine.

The boards

Go at nine, thirteen and nineteen lines. Nine is the teaching size, a game in fifteen minutes. Nineteen on A4 puts the lines about 27 mm apart, which is smaller than a real goban but fine for coins or the cut-out stones. Mancala is drawn vertically: two columns of six pits and a store at each end, so it fits a portrait page without rotating. Six, Nine and Twelve Men's Morris are the two- and three-square boards; twelve adds the corner diagonals. Backgammon is drawn tall with the bar across the middle and the twenty-four points numbered. Chess and checkers share an eight-by-eight board with optional coordinates, and have their own page.

Pieces

Tick the pieces page and a second sheet prints cut-out counters in two colours: sixteen a side with K, Q, R, B, N and P letters for chess, twelve for checkers, fifteen for backgammon, forty a side for Go, and the right count for each Morris board. Glue them to card or stick a coin behind each for weight. Mancala has no pieces page: it wants forty-eight beans, buttons or pasta shells.

Rules reminder

A short how-to-play block under the board, three sentences at most, for the games you half remember. The Backgammon one includes the starting position because that is the part nobody remembers.

Paper and ink

The boards print with no header on the sheet itself, just a small watermark, so they look like boards rather than worksheets. The Go and Mancala boards have a light cream fill; the Backgammon points alternate a tan and a brown. Everything else is black lines on white.