Nine Men’s Morris has been scratched into temple roofs, Roman floors, and cathedral cloisters for well over two thousand years — always in the same low-tech way, drawn onto whatever surface was handy. Keeping that tradition alive today takes almost nothing: a printed board and a handful of coins.

This page is about playing the mill game off the screen. If you want the full rundown of mills, double mills, and endgame tactics, our complete rules and strategy guide has it all. Here, we’ll keep it practical.

Hit Print Board below and the page prints just the board — the classic three concentric squares joined by lines, with all 24 points marked, clean and clutter-free on a single A4 or Letter sheet.

Classic Play Games
Nine Men's Morris

Place, then slide your pieces · Form a mill of three to capture · Block your opponent to win!

9 pieces per player — use two colors of coin, button, or bean
Play it online!
classicplaygames.com/games/nine-mens-morris

What to Print and What to Play With

  • Pieces: nine per player, in two easy-to-tell-apart sets. Coins are ideal — pennies vs. dimes, or heads vs. tails — but buttons, beans vs. corn, or two colors of Lego all work. You’ll place all eighteen, so make sure you have enough.
  • Paper: plain printer paper is fine. For a board that lasts, print on card stock or slip it into a clear sheet protector.
  • No printer? No problem. The board is just three nested squares with a line joining the middle of each side. Draw the outer square, then two smaller ones inside it, connect the side-midpoints, and you’re done.

A Two-Minute Setup

Nine Men’s Morris plays in three phases, and they’re easy to teach across a table:

  1. Placing. Take turns placing one piece on any empty point until all eighteen are down. Whenever you line up three along a line — a mill — remove one of your opponent’s pieces.
  2. Moving. Now slide a piece along a line to a neighboring empty point each turn, still trying to form mills. You can open a mill and re-close it to capture again.
  3. Flying. Once a player is down to three pieces, they may jump to any empty point instead of sliding.

You win by reducing your opponent to two pieces, or by blocking them so they can’t move. The points where lines meet in the middle of each side are the most valuable — grab them early.

Teaching Kids and Playing in Class

The mill game is a wonderful step up from Tic-Tac-Toe: the “three in a row” idea is familiar, but forming and re-forming mills adds real depth. Children can learn the placing phase in minutes, and the moving phase rewards thinking a turn or two ahead.

For a classroom, print one board per pair — it’s a great fit for a history lesson too, given the game’s astonishing age. For a family gathering, it’s a quick, quiet two-player game that a knockout bracket can run through fast.

A Couple of Paper Variations

  • Twelve Men’s Morris: add four diagonal lines connecting the corners of the squares and give each player twelve pieces — a busier board with more possible mills that fills up faster.
  • No flying: drop the three-piece “flying” rule so every move must slide to a neighbor, even at three pieces. Without flying as an escape hatch, a player down to three pieces is much easier to trap — making the endgame sharper and more decisive.

When you want a tireless opponent, play Nine Men’s Morris online against our AI — then print a board and bring the mill game back to the table.