Why do so many examples use Hard Coding? I thought this was bad form across all programming

The page you linked this question to has no examples of hard coding on it! Did you mean another page?

Also, in case the instructor doesn't post a more definitive answer, for the purposes of illustrating a specific technique the use of hard-coded values can help keep the example simple and make the technique being shown a bit more clear. You can, of course, apply the technique later in actual code without using any hard-coded values.

Just to add that in some cases I think hard-coding a value might be acceptable if it is not going to vary. For example, if the number of rows and columns (in the Board class) and the number of tokens per player (in the Player class) would always be the same, it is simpler to hard code those.