Nine men's morris is a strategy board game for two players. It is an ancient game, dating back to at least the Roman Empire. The game is also known as nine-man morris, mill, mills, the mill game, merels, merrills, merelles, marelles, morelles, and ninepenny marl in English. In North America, the game has also been called cowboy checkers, and its board is sometimes printed on the back of checkerboards. Nine men's morris is a solved game, that is, a game whose optimal strategy has already been calculated. It has been shown that with perfect play from both players, the game results in a draw. The classical Latin term mareculus is a diminutive of 'man'; the Ecclesiastical Latin word merellus means 'gamepiece', which may have been corrupted in English to 'morris', whilst miles is Latin for soldier. Three main alternative variations of the game are three, six, and twelve men's morris.
Rules The board consists of a grid with twenty-four intersections, or points. Each player has nine pieces, or men, usually coloured black and white. Players try to form 'mills'—three of their own men lined horizontally or vertically—allowing a player to remove an opponent's man from the game. A player wins by reducing the opponent to two men (whereupon they can no longer form mills and thus are unable to win) or by leaving them without a legal move. The game proceeds in three phases:
Placing men on vacant points Moving men to adjacent points (optional phase) Moving men to any vacant point when the player has been reduced to three men
Phase 1: placing pieces
The game begins with an empty board. The players determine who plays first and then take turns. During the first phase, a player's turn consists of placing a man from the player's hand onto an empty point. If a player is able to place three pieces on contiguous points in a straight line, vertically or horizontally, they have formed a mill, which allows them to remove one of the opponent's pieces from the board. A piece in an opponent's mill, however, can be removed only if no other pieces are available. After all men have been placed, phase two begins.
Phase 2: moving pieces Players continue to alternate moves, this time moving a man to an adjacent point each turn. A piece may not "jump" another piece. Players continue to try to form mills and remove the opponent's pieces as in phase one. If all of a player's pieces get blocked in (where they are unable to move to an adjacent, empty space) that player loses. A player can "break" a mill by moving a piece out of an existing mill, then moving it back to form the same mill a second time (or any number of times), each time removing one of the opponent's men. The act of removing an opponent's man is sometimes called "pounding" the opponent. When one player has been reduced to three men, phase three begins.
Phase 3: "flying" When a player is reduced to three pieces, there is no longer a limitation on that player of moving to only adjacent points: The player's men may "fly" (or "hop", or "jump") from any point to any vacant point. Some rules sources say this is the way the game is played, some treat it as a variation, and some do not mention it at all. A 19th-century games manual calls this the "truly rustic mode of playing the game". Flying was introduced to compensate when the weaker side is one man away from losing the game.
Strategy At the beginning of the game, it is more important to place pieces in versatile locations rather than to try to form mills immediately and make the mistake of concentrating one's pieces in one area of the board. Contemporary strategy manuals, such as Hans Schürmann and Manfred Nüscheler's So gewinnt man Mühle, Dr. Rainer Rosenberger's muehle lehrbuch and Benjamin Brandwood's Nine Men's Morris: Strategy, Edition 2, further emphasise the importance of building multiple latent mill threats while controlling key junctions that support both offensive mill formation and effective blocking play. Advanced computer-assisted analysis, including work by the Brillant Mill project by Alexander Szabari, Jozef Mičko, Ferenc Volman and György Bándy and the Malom program developed by G. E. Gévay and G. Danner, demonstrates that many positions are theoretically drawn with perfect play; nonetheless, practical winning chances arise when a player can manoeuvre into structures where a single piece shuttles between two distinct mills, enabling repeated captures or inducing zugzwang-like situations for the opponent. In high-level play, an ideal winning configuration is therefore one in which a player maintains such a "double-mill" shuttle while following precise, engine-verified sequences to convert structural advantages into victory or, at minimum, to avoid well-known drawing sequences identified in these computational studies.
Variants
Three men's morris
Three men's morris, also called nine-holes, is played on the points of a grid of 2×2 squares, or in the squares of a grid of 3×3 squares, as in tic-tac-toe. The game is for two players; each player has three men. The players put one man on the board in each of their first three plays, winning if a mill is formed (as in tic-tac-toe). After that, each player moves one of the player's men, according to one of the following rules versions:
A player wins by forming a mill. H. J. R. Murray calls version No. 1 "nine holes", and version No. 2 "three men's morris" or "the smaller merels".
Six men's morris
Six men's morris gives each player six pieces and is played without the outer square of the board for nine men's morris. Flying is not permitted. The game was popular in Italy, France and England during the Middle Ages but was obsolete by 1600. This board is also used for five men's morris (also called smaller merels). Seven men's morris uses this board with a cross in the center.
Twelve men's morris
Twelve men's morris adds four diagonal lines to the board and gives each player twelve pieces. This means the board can be filled in the placement stage; if this happens the game is a draw. This variation on the game is popular amongst rural youth in South Africa where it is known as morabaraba and is now recognized as a sport in that country. H. J. R. Murray also calls the game "the larger merels". This board is also used for eleven men's morris.
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