Six Men's Morris
Six Men's Morris Rulebook
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Six Men's Morris
Variant: Six Men's Morris
This is a variant that uses six pieces each. The board uses only the two inner squares (16 intersections). The rest of the rules are the same as in Nine Men's Morris.
Editor's note: the printed variant paragraph does not state whether a player reduced to three pieces may fly (move to any vacant point). It also does not restate the end-of-game condition for six men separately. No flying rule is transcribed here; the end-of-game rule below is the printed Nine Men's Morris rule, which the variant paragraph says still applies.
Nine Men's Morris Rules (applied to Six Men's Morris)
The sections below are the document's Nine Men's Morris rules. The variant paragraph above says the rest of the rules are the same. The Components text refers to nine pieces; for Six Men's Morris, each player uses six pieces, per the variant paragraph.
Components
Nine Men's Morris uses the board shown below and nine pieces of each of the two colors. In the general rules, diagonal lines are not used.
Figure 1: The board used in Nine Men's Morris. The classical rules do not use diagonal lines.
Preparing
Decide the order of play and the color of the pieces to be used by each other in any appropriate way, and then receive all the pieces to be used by each player.
Gameplay
The board is initially empty. Players take turns, starting with the first player, to place one piece of their color on the board at each intersection of the grid.
If a player's piece is lined up in three vertical or horizontal lines (called "mill"), that player chooses one of the opponent's pieces on the board and removes it from the game. However, you cannot take a piece from your opponent's "mill" as long as there are other pieces you can take.
On your turn after placing all your pieces on the board, you move one of your pieces on the board to the next intersection. If the move results in a "mill", the opponent's piece is still removed according to the rules.
Figure 2: The player of light color who made a "mill" by moving the rightmost piece may choose any of the dark color pieces indicated by the yellow dots to remove. It cannot be removed from the mill of the dark color on the bottom row.
Game End
The player who reduces the opponent's pieces to two or makes the opponent unable to move wins the game.
Strategy and Optional Rules
The shortcut to victory is to create a position that allows you to repeat the process of collapsing your "mill" once it has been created by a move, and then returning to the same position again on the next turn to create a mill. Some people think that defeating your opponent with such repeated mills is the most exciting part of the game, but sometimes a rule is taken that forbids you to bring back a mill on the next move once you have broken it.
Nine Men's Morris is a solved game, and analysis has shown that if both players always make perfect moves, the game will fall into a cycle and result in a draw. Such a tie can also occur in human play.
The classic rules do not use diagonal lines, but there are rules that allow diagonal moves (but not diagonal mills). I recommend this rule.
There seem to be two different rules when two mills are made at the same time: (1) remove only one of the opponent's pieces (2) remove two of the opponent's pieces.