What is Three Men's Morris?
Three Men's Morris is the smallest game of the morris family. The board is a square of nine points, three by three, joined along its rows, its columns and both diagonals. Each player has three men. White moves first.
The game starts on an empty board, and the players take turns placing one man on any empty point. Once all six men are on the board, each turn a player slides one of their men along a line, diagonals included, to a neighbouring empty point.
A mill, three of your men in a row along a line, wins the game at once, whether you make it while placing or while moving. Nothing is ever removed from the board, and there is no flying. A player who has no legal move on their turn loses.
It plays like noughts and crosses that never fills up: with only three men each, every move opens one line while it closes another, and a careless step lets the opponent slide into a row.
Rule changes
| Rule | Standard Nine Men's Morris | Three Men's Morris |
|---|---|---|
| Board | Standard Nine Men's Morris24 points on three nested squares, joined at the midpoints of their sides. | Three Men's Morris9 points on a 3×3 square, joined along the rows, the columns and both diagonals. |
| Men per player | Standard Nine Men's MorrisNine. | Three Men's MorrisThree. |
| What a mill does | Standard Nine Men's MorrisThe player who makes a mill removes one of the opponent's men. | Three Men's MorrisThe player who makes a mill wins the game. No man is ever removed. |
| Moving | Standard Nine Men's MorrisAfter all men are placed, a man slides along a line to a neighbouring empty point. | Three Men's MorrisThe same, after all six men are placed. The diagonals are lines too, so the centre point touches all eight others. |
| Flying | Standard Nine Men's MorrisA player with three men left may move a man to any empty point. It is on by default and can be switched off in the table setup. | Three Men's MorrisNever. Men always slide to a neighbouring point, and the flying option is not offered. |
| How to win | Standard Nine Men's MorrisReduce the opponent to two men, or leave them with no legal move. | Three Men's MorrisMake a line of three, or leave the opponent with no legal move. |
History
Games of three in a row on a small square of nine points are very old and are found in many places. The board of Three Men's Morris, with its diagonals, is among the diagrams cut into the roofing slabs of the temple at Kurna in Egypt. R. C. Bell dated them to about 1400 BCE, but Friedrich Berger pointed out that some of the diagrams there include Coptic crosses and concluded that they cannot be dated. Bell also cites a passage in book III of Ovid's Ars Amatoria (about 8 CE) that describes a game in which the winner must get all of their pieces in a straight line.
The game is known in the Philippines as tapatan and in China as luk tsut k'i. In England boards were carved into the cloister seats of cathedrals, and Bell describes the game as quite popular there in the 13th century.
There are two ways to move. In the historian H. J. R. Murray's terms, the game where a man may move to any empty point is nine holes, and the game where a man moves only to a neighbouring point along a line is three men's morris, or the smaller merels. The game here is three men's morris in Murray's sense.