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The history of Nine Men's Morris
Few board games are as old, as widespread and as well documented as Nine Men's Morris. Its board has been found scratched in stone, carved in ships' planks and cut into the turf of English village greens.
Ancient claims, and what is actually known
You will often read that Nine Men's Morris is 3,000 years old and began in Egypt. The claim goes back to R. C. Bell, who dated diagrams carved on roof slabs of a temple at Kurna to about 1400 BC. The game historian Friedrich Berger doubted this, partly because Coptic crosses were found among the diagrams, so the carvings may be far younger. Treat the Egyptian date as unproven.
The Roman era
The Romans certainly knew the small cousin. In the Ars Amatoria (about 8 CE) the poet Ovid describes a game on a small board in which each player has three pieces, and the winner is the one who gets them into a straight line; he adds that a girl should know how to play, since romance often starts over a board. This three-in-a-row game is known as terni lapilli, and it is the ancestor of tic-tac-toe. Boards scratched on stone at Roman sites have been identified as nine-men games, though scratched boards are very hard to date.
The Viking Age
Nine Men's Morris was in northern Europe by the Viking Age. In the Gokstad ship burial in Norway (about 900 CE) archaeologists found a loose game board with Nine Men's Morris on one side and the strategy game hnefatafl on the other. A Viking ship burial at Årby in Sweden had the board carved on a ship's plank, and a plank from a Viking ship found in Aarhus in 1994 carries both a Nine Men's Morris board and a smaller three-men board. The old Danish name was Nitavl, nine-board, and by the 14th century, the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde notes, it was one of the most played games in much of Europe.
Medieval Europe
A 12th-century board from Novgorod and the 13th-century Libro de los juegos ("Book of Games") of King Alfonso X of Castile, which shows players at a morris board with dice, show how widely the game was played. In England it became so popular that boards were cut into the stone seats of cathedral cloisters at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich, Salisbury and Westminster Abbey, and into a pillar at Chester Cathedral. Names such as merels, merrills and nine-penny marl appear in many places. The word morris is thought to come from merels, from an Old French word for a counter.
Shakespeare and the village green
In A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act 2, Scene 1, written around 1595) the fairy queen Titania complains that the quarrels of the fairy king have ruined the weather:
"The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud, / And the quaint mazes in the wanton green / For lack of tread are undistinguishable."
This line shows that in Shakespeare's England morris boards were cut into the turf of village greens. The mud has filled the cuts because nobody is out playing.
Later centuries
Six Men's Morris, popular in the Middle Ages, was obsolete by about 1600, while Nine Men's Morris lived on in rural England, in German-speaking Europe as Mühle, in Hungary as malom, in Scandinavia and in North America, where it was sometimes called "cowboy checkers" (see the names around the world). A table with a Nine Men's Morris board, made in Germany in 1735, is in the Cleveland Museum of Art. In the 20th century the chess champion Emanuel Lasker invented the ten-man variant that bears his name (see variants).
A solved game
In November 1993 Ralph Gasser announced that he had solved Nine Men's Morris. Using retrograde analysis, the technique used for chess endgames, he built databases of about ten billion midgame and endgame positions, and then searched the placing phase 18 plies deep. The result: with perfect play the game is a draw. His paper "Solving Nine Men's Morris" appeared in 1996 in the book Games of No Chance. Later, Gévay and Danner at the University of Szeged, Hungary, published an even stronger solution and released a program called Malom.
Today
The game that once needed a cloister bench now needs only a phone. See how to play Nine Men's Morris online.
Frequently asked questions
Is Nine Men's Morris really 3,000 years old?
Not provably. A claim that it appears on an Egyptian temple at Kurna from about 1400 BC is disputed. The earliest solid evidence is Roman-era writing and scratched boards, and clear boards from the Viking Age.
Where does Shakespeare mention Nine Men's Morris?
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 2, Scene 1, Titania says, 'The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud', referring to the boards cut in the turf of village greens.
Has Nine Men's Morris been solved?
Yes. Ralph Gasser announced in 1993 that with perfect play the game ends in a draw, and later work by Gévay and Danner confirmed and extended it.