How to play
Three Men's Morris
Also known as Three Bead, Nine Holes, Smaller Merels, Tapatan, Marelle, Achi, Tant Fant
- 1M+ downloads
- On Google Play since 2018
- Free to play
What is Three Men's Morris?
Three Men's Morris is the smallest game in the Morris (merels) family, played on a 3x3 board of nine points with three pieces per player. Each side first places its three pieces, and then, if nobody has won, play continues by moving a piece each turn until someone lines up all three. That movement phase is what separates it from tic-tac-toe: the board never fills up, so the game does not simply stop in a stalemate once the pieces are down.
How to play Three Men's Morris
Setting up the board
The board is a 3x3 grid of nine points formed by three horizontal and three vertical lines; most boards also draw the two diagonals through the centre. One player takes three light pieces and the other three dark, and the board starts completely empty. Decide who moves first, since going first is a real advantage in this game.
The rules, step by step
- Starting from an empty board, players alternate turns placing one piece on any vacant point until each side has placed all three pieces.
- Six pieces occupy nine points, so three points always remain empty; a player who completes a line during placement wins immediately.
- Once all six pieces are down, players alternate turns moving one of their own pieces per turn. You must move, and only one piece moves per turn.
- In the standard Morris rule, a piece slides one step along a drawn line to an adjacent empty point. On boards with diagonals, many rule sets also allow a corner to step directly to the centre.
- In the older Nine Holes version described by H. J. R. Murray, a piece may instead be moved to any vacant point on the board, not only an adjacent one.
- Pieces are never captured or removed, and pieces do not jump over other pieces.
- Diagonals are a variant point: on the common board with diagonals drawn, a diagonal line of three wins. Many rule sets also forbid the first player from opening in the centre, and declare a draw if the same position repeats.
How to win
The first player to line up all three of their own pieces along a drawn line on the board wins that game. Depending on the board in use this can be any row, any column, and on boards with diagonals either diagonal.
Strategy tips
- Take the centre if the rules allow it. On a board with diagonals the centre sits on four of the eight winning lines and touches the most points, which makes it the single strongest square.
- Moving first is worth more here than in most abstract games, so in a friendly match alternate who starts and score across paired games rather than single ones.
- Blocking is a move, not a waste of a turn. If your opponent has two pieces on a line and a third piece that can reach the open point, occupy that point before doing anything else.
- Before you slide a piece, check what you are vacating. The classic loss in the movement phase is moving the very piece that was blocking your opponent's line.
- Look for double threats. A move that creates two separate two-in-a-rows at once cannot be answered, because your opponent can only block one of them.
Origin and history
The game is genuinely ancient, though several of its claimed origins are disputed rather than settled.
R.
C.
Bell identified a board cut into the roofing slabs of the temple at Kurna in Egypt and dated it to roughly 1400 BCE, but Friedrich Berger pointed out that some of the Kurna diagrams include Coptic crosses and concluded they cannot be reliably dated.
The clearest early written reference is Roman: in Book III of the Ars Amatoria (c. 8 CE) Ovid describes a game with three pieces on either side in which the winner is the one who gets their pieces into a straight line.
Later boards were cut into the cloister seats of the English cathedrals at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich and Salisbury, and the word morris comes not from Morris dancing but from the Latin merellus, meaning a counter or gaming piece.
Frequently asked questions
They share a 3x3 grid and a three-in-a-row goal, but tic-tac-toe ends when the board fills, while Three Men's Morris keeps going. Each side has only three pieces, so six pieces sit on nine points and three points always stay empty. Once all pieces are placed, players move a piece each turn, which turns the endgame into a game of manoeuvring and blocking.
In the adjacent-movement version with no restrictions, yes: the first player has a winning strategy, and it starts with placing the first piece in the centre. That is exactly why many rule sets ban the centre as an opening move. With that ban in place, neither player has a winning strategy, so well-played games tend to end in repetition and a draw.
Both rules exist and it is worth agreeing before you start. Murray called the free version Nine Holes, where a piece may be moved to any vacant point. He called the restricted version Three Men's Morris, where a piece may only step along a line to an adjacent empty point. The adjacent-only rule is the one most modern versions use.
The board never fills, so the game cannot draw by running out of space the way tic-tac-toe does. Instead, two careful players can shuffle pieces indefinitely. Most rule sets handle this with a repetition rule, declaring a draw when the same position occurs three times with the same player to move.
They are close relatives, but not all identical. Tapatan from the Philippines and Marelle from France are the same game with the adjacent-movement rule. Nine Holes is the English hole-based form with free movement and no diagonal win. Achi from Ghana uses the same board but gives each player four pieces instead of three.
