Board (bridge)

In duplicate bridge, a board is an item of equipment that holds one deal, or one deck of 52 cards distributed in four hands of 13 cards each. The design permits the entire deal of four hands to be passed, carried or stacked securely with the cards hidden from view in four pockets. This is required for in-person duplicate bridge tournaments, where the same deal is played several times and so the composition of each hand must be preserved during and after each play of each deal. When bridge is played online, the functions of the physical boards are replaced by the software.

Each board is usually marked with the following information: board number – (from '1' to as high as '36') identifies the deal and helps to order the play of multiple deals; compass directions – used to match the four hands to the four players at a table; dealer – designates which player is the "dealer"; this designates the player who is to make the first call of the auction; vulnerability – often represented by color code: a "vulnerable" partnership is usually shown in red and a "not vulnerable" partnership in green, white or no color. Most designs include a slot or pocket to hold a paper travelling score sheet.

Colloquially, the term board may refer to unit of the game as being one deal plus its bidding and play.

First used in duplicate whist in the 1890s, the devices were called duplicate whist trays. Since the first in November 1891, numerous patents have been registered incorporating a variety of shapes, sizes and materials and having various means of inserting and retaining the cards in place in the trays or apparatus, as they were often referred to in the patent description. Amongst the earliest versions were those manufactured by Ihling Brothers & Everard of Kalamazoo, Michigan^, and referred to as the Kalamazoo Tray, a square tray, getting award-winning recognition at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The company's interests in duplicate whist trays were purchased by The Duplicate Whist Co. in 1899, which introduced a tray known as the Paine's Duplicate Whist Tray after its president, Cassius M. Paine; Paine used the U.S. Playing Card Co. of Cincinnati as his sole manufacturing and sales agent.

Originally, trays were sold in sets of 8, 12, 16 and 20; after the concept of vulnerability was introduced to contract bridge in 1926 and the adoption of boards for duplicate bridge, a set consists of 16 (or 32) boards, owing to the 16 possible deal combinations arising from the four states of vulnerability for each of the four dealer positions. By the mid-1930s, thirty or forty different types were being sold. The first oblong boards were made of paper by William McKenney in 1928; the first metal boards were by F. Dudley Courtney in 1931.

The most common modern boards are rectangular in shape and made of plastic replacing earlier models made of paper covered pasteboard, sheet metal, wood and more recently aluminum. Boards designed as foldable wallets, originally made of leather, primarily used in England, are now generally made of pliable plastic. While the concept of the contract bridge duplicate board evolved from the duplicate whist tray,

...it is called a "board" rather than a "tray" stems from the fact that the earliest widely accepted models were made of wood.

— Alex Groner, Duplicate Bridge Direction: A Complete Handbook (11th printing ed.). Port Chester, NY: Barclay Bridge Supplies Inc. 1989. p. 16. LCCN 67029818.