Tessellation

A tessellation is a repeating pattern of regular geometric shapes (called tiles) covering a flat surface or plane. A vast portion of all abstract board games use some sort of tessellation for the pattern of their board. A square grid is probably the simplest sort of tessellation and is widely used in board games but other polygons and shapes may be used for board construction such as triangles, hexagons, octagons and dodecagons (a twelve-sided polygon). A true tessellation, as mathematically prescribed, should have no gaps or overlaps of shapes. The pattern can be repeated and expanded out to an infinitely large size.