this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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Nine men's morris is a strategy board game for two players. It is an ancient game, dating back to at least the Roman Empire.[1] The game is also known as nine-man morris, mill, mills, the mill game, merels, merrills, merelles, marelles, morelles, and ninepenny marl[2] in English. In North America, the game has also been called cowboy checkers, and its board is sometimes printed on the back of checkerboards. Nine men's morris is a solved game, that is, a game whose optimal strategy has already been calculated. It has been shown that with perfect play from both players, the game results in a draw.

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

There's a really good rendition of the game available in the Debian/Ubuntu and Arch repos simply called Morris (available for Windows there, too), hopefully it's available on other distros repos as well. Though if not, there's a bunch of renditions of it available online.

There's also a more advanced version from Africa called Morabaraba

[–] rimu@piefed.social 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oooo, this is harder than it looks.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 days ago

The app I linked to seems like it may be particularly hard, and according to description even learns from past games. I've yet to beat it myself.