If you need to look at the contact stresses between the board and the ground, then certainly a contact analysis will be required. Sounds like this is the direct you're going from your last post. But remember that you'll need to constrain the ground too... Fully fixing it underneath might be a good approach to start with.
If you don't want to compute the contact stresses, but rather are interested in the displacements/stresses in the board itself, then you can just use constraints. In any case, you should start with this analysis so you know you have the modeling of the board done correctly, before adding the nonlinearity of the contact. If the geometry/loading is symmetric then it would make a lot of sense to cut the board in the middle and use a symmetry constraint there too. This will save you some time in solving. If you use solid elements it's pretty easy, since they only have translational degrees of freedom. Just make sure that the displacement through the mirror plane is fixed. Be careful not to overconstrain (i.e. think about how the material might want to squish out in other directions, and let it do so.) You''ll probably want to add two other point constraints to stop the model from flying around. If you get the "the model is insufficiently constrained for the analysis" error, then you know you need to add these constraints correctly. There are plenty of tutorials on this type of constraint approach in the help system.
