The question is already answered but I wanted to point out another solution which is fast and works if length is not meant to be changed at run-time. Use macro #define before main() to define length and in main() your initialization will work:
#define length 10
int main()
{
int boardAux[length][length] = {{0}};
}
Macros are run before the actual compilation and length will be a compile-time constant (as referred by David RodrÃguez in his answer). It will actually substitute length with 10 before compilation.