Three Men's Morris
| Players | 2 |
|---|---|
| Setup time | < 1 minute |
| Playing time | < 1 hour |
| Random chance | None |
| Skill(s) required | Strategy |
Three Men's Morris is an abstract strategy game played on a three by three board (counting lines) that is similar to tic-tac-toe. It is also related to Six Men's Morris and Nine Men's Morris.
Each player has three pieces. The winner is the first player to align their three pieces on a line drawn on the board. There are 3 horizontal lines, 3 vertical lines and 2 diagonal lines.
The board is empty to begin the game, and players take turns placing their pieces on empty intersections. Once all pieces are placed (assuming there is no winner by then), play proceeds with each player moving one of their pieces per turn. A piece may move to any vacant point on the board, not just an adjacent one.
According to A History of Chess page 614, there is an alternative version in which pieces may not move to any vacant point, but only to any adjacent empty position, i.e. from a corner to the middle of an adjacent edge, from the middle of an edge to the center or an adjacent corner, or from the center to the middle of an edge.
H. J. R. Murray calls the first version "nine holes" and the second version "three men's morris" or "the smaller merels".
The earliest known board for the game was "cut into the roofing slabs of the temple at Kurna in Egypt" c. 1400 BCE. When played on this board, the game is called Tapatan in the Philippines and Luk Tsut K'i ("six man chess") in China. It is thought that Luk Tsut K'i was played during the time of Confucius c. 500 BCE. Centuries later, the game was mentioned in Ovid's Ars Amatoria, according to R. C. Bell. In book III (c. 8 CE), after discussing chess, Ovid wrote:
There is another game divided into as many parts as there are months in the year. A table has three pieces on either side; the winner must get all the pieces in a straight line. It is a bad thing for a woman not to know how to play, for love often comes into being during play.
Boards were carved into the cloister seats at the English cathedrals at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich, Salisbury and Westminster Abbey; the game was quite popular in England in the 13th century. These boards used holes, not lines, to represent the nine spaces on the board—hence the name "nine holes"—and forming a diagonal row did not win the game.
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