History

This game is very old, no one knows for sure how old it is. There are engravings that come down to us from ancient Egypt illustrating this board.

The family of “three in a row” type games is large, our game is the penultimate one on this small list.

Material

Nino Men's Morris or Mill is played on a board consisting of three concentric squares connected by lines that join the middle parts of the inner squares to the outer ones. Nine white pieces and nine black pieces are used.

Definitions

Mill — three pieces of the same color in a line.

Rules

At the beginning, the board is empty. Each move consists of placing a piece on one of the 24 intersections of lines. In the first phase, players alternate placing pieces on empty intersections until all 18 pieces are in play. Then, they alternate moving a piece to an adjacent free spot.

In any of these phases, a player who obtains a mill may remove an opponent's piece from the board of his choice, as long as it is not part of a mill. If all of the opponent's pieces belong to mills, he may remove any one. Only when a mill is formed can a player capture it, but it is normal for a player to dismantle a mill and then rebuild it by capturing a piece.

Captured pieces permanently leave the game. The game ends if a player has fewer than three pieces or is prevented from playing.

Objective

The objective is to reduce the number of opponent pieces to less than three or block it.

Variants

Sometimes an extreme rule is used when a player only has three pieces.

In this case, the player who only has three pieces can play to any point on the board, regardless of whether it is adjacent or not.

Boards with alternative designs have been used for centuries. The most common is the one obtained from ours by joining the four diagonals in the corners (see the last board in the illustration above). The pieces can move and form windmills on these new lines as well.