Bonus Board Game
Nine Men's Morris - Thought to be one of the oldest board games in history
(included with Robin Hood: Conquests of the Longbow software)

To print the board, first save it to your hard drive by right-clicking on it and choosing "Save Picture As"/"Save Image As." Then, open and print it using your browser. Instructions for playing the game appear below the board graphic.

Instructions

Morris could easily be one of the oldest, still-played board games in the world. It's been found scratched into the roof of a 1400 B.C. Egyptian temple, in the ruins of Troy, in a Bronze Age tomb in Ireland, and in the burial ship of a Viking king. "Morris" seems to have come from the French name for the game "merelles."

This is a two-person game. Each player has 9 pieces. Anything will do: 9 dimes and 9 pennies, 9 poker chips of 2 colors, etc. There are 24 points on the board where a piece may be placed. These are the corners of the squares and the places where the connecting lines intersect.

The object of the game is to create "mills" and remove your opponant's pieces from the board until he only has 2 pieces left or is unable to make any moves. A "mill" is 3 of the same player's pieces laid in a row with no vacant points between them. Each time a player moves one of her pieces so that she creates a new mill, she can remove one of her opponent's pieces. Pieces that line up diagonally or without being connected by a line do not count.

How to begin: determine, however you like, which player gets the first move. That player may place 1 of his pieces on any vacant point (remember, there are 24 points). Then the other player places 1 piece. They take turns placing pieces until all 9 pieces have been placed on the board.

While the players put down the nine pieces, each one should be trying to do 2 things: create a mill; or prevent the other player from creating a mill. Once all remaining pieces (not counting any lost because the opponent created a mill) have been placed on the board, the second part of the game is for the players to continue taking turns moving 1 of their pieces to an adjacent vacant point on the board. A player may not jump over her own or another player's piece and moves must be made along the lines only. A piece cannot jump across spaces.

A player who has made a mill may not take a piece from one of his opponent's mills unless there are no other pieces to take. A new mill may be formed by a player moving one of her pieces from an existing mill (so it's no longer a mill) in one turn and moving it back into the same place to recreate the mill on her next turn (providid the other player doesn't block the space in the meantime.) And that's it. Have fun!

~Thanks to Charadee Nisonger for providing this material!