The history of Nine Men's Morris

A game cut into stone

Nine Men's Morris is one of the most widely distributed board games in history, and one of the hardest to date — because its board was usually not a board at all. It was scratched into stone steps, roof slabs, church benches and tavern tables, wherever people sat and waited.

Morris-shaped diagrams appear on stone across the ancient and medieval world. A frequently quoted example is a pattern cut into a roofing slab at the temple at Kurna in Egypt, sometimes dated to around 1400 BCE — though, as with all graffiti, the cut cannot be dated more precisely than the stone's long life, and the claim should be treated with caution.

What is solid is the Roman evidence. Boards for merels — the Latin family is merellus, a counter or token — are found across the Roman world, and the game clearly circulated with the empire.

The medieval game everyone played

In medieval Europe, Nine Men's Morris was ubiquitous. Boards are carved into the cloister benches of cathedrals, the stone seats of castles, the decks of ships. One was found aboard the Gokstad ship, the ninth-century Viking vessel excavated in Norway.

It appears in literature too. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's Titania describes a countryside ruined by bad weather: "the nine men's morris is filled up with mud" — a reference to the outdoor version, cut into village turf and played with people or large counters. That single line tells us the game was so familiar to an Elizabethan audience that it needed no explanation.

The names follow the geography: Mühle in German, Mølle in Danish, Molenspel in Dutch, Merels or Merrills in England, Filetto in Italian, Alquerque de nueve in medieval Spain. Twelve Men's Morris travelled with settlers to the Americas and remains common in parts of Africa and South Asia.

Solved in 1993

In 1993, Ralph Gasser at ETH Zurich solved Nine Men's Morris: with perfect play from both sides, the game is a draw. He did it by combining endgame databases — built backwards from every position with few men — with a forward search from the opening.

The result put the game in a small club: alongside Connect Four (1988), checkers (2007) and Othello (2023), it is one of the classic games whose value is known. And as with those, it made no practical difference to human play — the draw requires accuracy that club players do not have, and the placing phase in particular is full of traps.

One useful finding did come out of the analysis: the placing phase is more important than it looks. Many games are effectively decided before a single man has moved, by one player building a structure with more potential mills than the other.

Morris today

Nine Men's Morris has no single governing body but a steady competitive scene, strongest in Germany, where Mühle is a standard pub and club game with national tournaments. It is also a fixture of museum shops and historical re-enactment, because it is one of the few games you can honestly present as medieval.

For a modern player its interest is the phase change. The placing phase is a construction problem; the moving phase is a mobility problem; the endgame with flying is a tactical puzzle. Very few games of comparable simplicity ask three different questions in one sitting.

Common questions