Player Board

A player board is a personal panel — cardboard, sometimes double-layered, sometimes just heavy card stock — that sits in front of one player and holds whatever’s theirs alone: resources, a building tableau, a score track, a personal engine of cards or tokens. It’s distinct from the shared board in the middle of the table, which everyone reads and reacts to together.

Games built around individual engine-building or heavy resource management tend to lean on player boards hardest, since there’s simply too much personal state to track on a single shared surface. They also make a table easier to read at a glance — you can usually tell how everyone’s doing just by scanning boards, without asking anyone to explain their position out loud.