12-Mans Morris

Number of players: 2
Type of game: Boardgame
Period: 14th Century

History

Also called Merrils, or The Mill Game, Morris has been played in various forms, for over 3,000 years. The oldest boards have been found in The Temple of Kourna in Egypt, and date from the 14th century B.C. A similar board was found in a neolithic burial in County Wicklow, Ireland. In the 13th century A.D. it appeared in the Spanish King Alphonso X’s “Book of Games.” It is most often played with 9 men, and simpler versions have been played with 5, or 6 men on a board with just two concentric squares. During the
14th century diagonal lines were added to join the corners of the squares and it was played with 12 men. This version was brought to the Americas by English settlers, but the 9-man version continues to be the most common variant.

Rules

Each player starts with twelve men. Players draw lots to see who begins, and then take turns placing men on the intersections of the lines. The object is to form a “mill” -three of your men in a straight line, as in Tick-tack-toe. Whenever a player creates a mill, they can capture any of one of their opponent’s men on the board.

Once a man is removed from the board it is dead, and cannot be played again.
The players continue to take turns placing their men, and attempting to capture pieces, until all of the live pieces are on the board. At that point, players begin to take turns sliding their men along the lines. They can move only one space at a time, to any vacant intersection. Their goal is to continue attempting to make new mills and capturing enemy pieces, or blocking the opponent from making mills. Patterns can be formed so that each time a mill is broken, a new one is formed. The winner is the player who reduces his opponent down to just two men on the board.
An aspect of 12-Man Morris is that it is possible to have a stalemate. If no pieces are captured during the first half of the game all 24 of the intersections will be occupied, and there will be no vacant spaces left on the board for sliding the men.

Optional Rules

• If a player breaks up their own mill while sliding a piece, they cannot reform that mill on their next turn using the same piece. They must make a different move upon their next turn before reforming the broken mill. However, if there is a different stone that can be used to re-form that mill, it is considered a “new” mill and is allowed. Unless playing with young children, we recommend always playing by this rule, otherwise, players can simply whittle away at each other by moving a single piece back and forth between two mills.
• Some people include a rule that once a player is reduced to just 3 men on the board, they can jump pieces to any vacant spot on the board. This can help even the odds for young children who haven’t yet developed a sense of strategy.
• In an early version of 12-Man, players were not allowed to use mills formed along the diagonal lines that connected the corners. The diagonals were only used during the second part of the game for sliding pieces.

• Boardgame