Morris Mirage

Place and then move your nine men to form mills. A mill only triggers a capture if all three men in the line share the same secret colour. Reduce your opponent below three men, or leave them with no legal move, to win.

• During placing, you secretly assign each man a hidden colour
• A mill captures an enemy man only when its three colours match
• Opponent colours show as masked, you must deduce them

• Desktop: hover to see legal moves, click to place, select, move, or capture
• Phone & tablet: tap to select and move; a mouse helps with the hover hints

• Versus computer, Easy, Normal, or Hard
• Two-player hotseat on one device
• Online multiplayer

• Bluff with mismatched colours to set up a line that won't trigger early
• Track which enemy men were involved in failed mills to infer their hues
• When down to three men you can fly anywhere, keep that threat in reserve

Nine men's morris is old enough to predate the Roman Empire's decline, and has carried a dozen names — mill, merels, merrills, marelles, ninepenny marl. Place nine men, then move them, and completing a line of three lets you take an enemy piece.

The original rule is that each man has a secret colour, and a mill only captures if all three men in the line share it.

Morris is a solved game that draws with perfect play, and it is solved because a mill is a mill — the board tells you everything. Hiding a property of your own pieces means you can form a line and learn only then whether it was worth forming, which is not a variation on the strategy so much as a different game wearing its board.

Morris Mirage layers hidden-colour deduction over the classic nine men's morris mill game. It is an original free browser game built in-house for PlayPendium.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.