Nine Men's Morris
the mill game · scratched into cloister stones for a thousand years
THE ANCIENT WORLD · STILL PLAYED EVERYWHERE
The first game the school ever put on a screen, and still the one that empties the room's afternoon.
The history
Stones that remember
Three squares, one inside another, joined by lines: twenty-four points, nine pieces a side, and rules a child can learn in five minutes. Nine men's morris may be the oldest board game in the world still played for pleasure — and its name is a small muddle: morris most likely comes from the Latin merellus, a gaming counter, and the men are your nine pieces. It has nothing to do with the dancing, whatever the name suggests. Boards survive cut into stone from Roman times onward — scratched into steps and pavements where soldiers and idlers waited — and one was cut into a roofing tile of a temple in Egypt, high above the priests. Whoever carved it up there wanted a game where the waiting was.
The cloister game
In the Middle Ages the board turns up carved into the stone benches of cathedral cloisters — Gloucester, Canterbury, Norwich — where monks and schoolboys passed the slow hours with a game that needed nothing but pebbles and a scratched diagram. No box, no board, no purchase: any flat stone and eighteen counters, and the game exists. That is why it survived when grander games were lost.
The other side of a Viking board
The game travelled, too. On the back of the carved gaming board buried in the Gokstad ship in Norway, around the year 890, opposite the hnefatafl on its front, sits nine men's morris. A Viking-age traveller carried both games on one piece of wood — the same pairing the Games Room keeps today.
Shakespeare and the mud
The game was also played large, cut into village greens and churchyard turf, and it is that outdoor board Titania means in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud' — rain had flooded the trenches of the turf board. Only a game everyone knew could be weather in a Shakespeare line.
The honest footnote
Morris needs no reconstruction, and that is its difference from hnefatafl: the game never died out, so its rules come down by playing, not by guessing. Villages kept their own small variations — whether a man in a mill can ever be taken is the famous one — but the game overleaf is the standard traditional form, the one played in cloisters, on greens, and on the back of a Viking board.
The rules, plainly
A game for two players · nine men each · decide by lot who places first
The board and the men
The board has twenty-four points: every corner and every place where lines meet or cross. Each player takes nine men of one colour. Decide by lot who places first.
What a mill does
Three of your men in a straight line along one drawn line is a MILL. Every mill you close — in any part of the game — lets you remove one enemy man from the board, there and then. A man standing in an enemy mill cannot be taken, unless every enemy man on the board stands in a mill; then any of them is fair.
Part one — placing
Take turns setting one man on any empty point, until all eighteen men are on the board. Mills count from the very first placements: close three in a row and remove an enemy man before play has properly begun. Watch what is being built, not only what is being taken.
Part two — moving
Now slide. On your turn, move one of your men along a line to the next point along it — the point must be empty. Mills count here too, every time you close one. Sliding a man OUT of a mill and back in again next turn closes it a second time and takes a second enemy man: that shuttle is legal, ancient, and the engine of the whole game. Guard against it, and build your own.
Part three — flying
A player down to their last three men may FLY: instead of sliding, jump any one of your men to any empty point on the board. Mills still count, and a flying player is dangerous — three men, anywhere, every turn.
Winning
You win in either of two ways: take enemy men until only two are left, or hem the enemy in so that on their turn no man can slide (flying players can always move). Captured men never come back. If a hundred turns pass without a capture, call it honours even and set it again.
Play it here
Play against the school, at Apprentice, Journeyman, or Master strength — or pass the screen and play a friend.
Computer strength
THE RULES, PLAINLY
The board has twenty-four points. Each side has nine men.
Part one — placing. Take turns setting one man on any empty point until all eighteen are on the board.
Mills. Three of your men in a straight line along one drawn line is a mill. Every mill you close, in any part of the game, lets you remove one enemy man at once. A man standing in a mill cannot be taken — unless every enemy man on the board stands in a mill; then any of them is fair.
Part two — moving. Slide one man along a line to the next point; it must be empty. Sliding out of a mill and back in next turn closes it again, and takes a second man — that shuttle is legal, ancient, and the engine of the game.
Part three — flying. Down to your last three men, you may fly: jump any man to any empty point.
Winning. Take enemy men until only two are left, or hem the enemy in so no man can slide. A hundred turns without a capture is called honours even.