Morris: Game Development Notes 1

25 January, 2026

I'm developing a new game concept based on the ancient game of Nine-Men's Morris.

Introduction to Morris

In Nine-Men's Morris, two players take turns placing their 9 pieces, then moving them through adjacent, empty slots. Forming any straight line of 3 pieces - similar to Tic-Tac-Toe - allows you to remove one of your opponent's pieces. This straight line is also known as a mill.

The game ends when a player has 2 pieces remaining or has no legal moves. Many variations have rules to declare a stalemate when board positions are repeated or a number of turns pass without a mill.

Variants of Morris typically modify the board's topology, change the initial piece count, or both. For example, Six-Men's Morris is played on a smaller board with 6 pieces per player, while Morabaraba adds diagonals and plays with a whopping 12 pieces.

The Era of Flight

All versions of Morris feature a curious rule when a player reaches 3 pieces: that player's movement is no longer bound to adjacent slots. Instead, pieces may fly to any open slot. In short, the game reaches the "era of flight".

Unfortunately, flight makes victory by deadlock mathematically impossible. Additionally, without an extraordinary material advantage (2 or even 3 more pieces than your opponent), I believe it is also impossible for the advantaged player to achieve victory by elimination. Outside of exceptionally poor strategies, a stalemate is guaranteed.

There are numerous research papers employing various empirical methods to show that Nine-Men's Morris, when played optimally (or even reasonably well) by both players, always results in a draw. It's literally Tic-Tac-Toe on steroids.

Game Design, Morris, and Fun™

Let's zoom out for a minute. In my game design toolbox is the well-known treatise, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. In Lenses, the author offers a series of perspectives, or lenses, for analyzing games holistically.

One of the most critical lenses is lens #5, the Lens of Fun. It asks, "Is your game fun?"

As a competent game of Morris progresses, one player generally obtains a material (piece count) advantage. At this point, the disadvantaged player has no path to victory; they must aim for a stalemate instead. And once the era of flight is reached, they can effectively guarantee that stalemate.

Material advantage is frustrating because it cannot be capitalized upon, while material disadvantage is frustrating because it has no recourse - the optimal outcome is merely not a loss. You won't win even if you play well, and you won't lose even if you play poorly.

It's not a stretch to conclude that this situation is Not Fun™. Like Tic-Tac-Toe, you're going to get bored when every single game ends in a draw.

Breaking Morris

Morris has entertained humanity for millennia, appearing in every major civilization since Ancient Egypt. Clearly, the classic core of the game is tantalizing and pervasive. That doesn't make it a great game, but it does make it worth attempting to resolve the fundamental predisposition to stalemates.

To do so, we need to break Morris so that it's fun to be ahead, and it's fun to be behind. Both of those only occur after an initial burst of placement and shuffling, so to rephrase the problem succinctly: we need to give Morris a proper endgame. The resulting game should have the same semantics as classical Morris - boards and pieces, placement and movement - but most games should end in conclusive victory rather than an excruciating stalemate.

If done correctly, the new game will retain its undeniable approachability while paving the way to true strategic depth.

Future Steps

I've come up with several variations to accomplish this lofty goal. Each one subverts the optimality of material advantage by introducing a new mechanic or alternative win condition. My favorites so far are as follows.

• Castle Morris. The board features castles that must be controlled on the same turn to win.
• Scrabble Morris. The board features point-scoring slots, and the game ends when a target number of points is reached.
• Cat & Mouse Morris. The game ends after exactly N turns. The player with fewer pieces (the "mouse") wins after N turns, unless their opponent (the "cat") can remove all their pieces.
• Merge Morris. Instead of removing pieces, mills cause pieces to merge and gain flight charges. The first player to reach 1 piece wins.
• Wish Morris. Instead of removing pieces, mills grant wishes. A wish is a currency that can be banked, or consumed for various effects, like flying a piece, removing a piece, or gaining a new piece altogether.

My immediate task is to playtest these variants, then write heuristics to determine if they break the stalemate predisposition of classical Morris. Hopefully, one of them emerges as a promising numerical playground for a deep, tactical, and, most importantly, fun game.