9-Dice Morris

Tactics Meet Chance

In 9-Dice Morris, you don't just use your dice as game pieces – their numerical values determine victory or defeat!

Bet wisely, create mills with identical numbers, and even use your opponent's dice to your advantage. But be careful: What you can do with your opponent's dice, they can do with yours!

9-Men Morris is the board game I have played most, without a doubt. I remember the summer holidays 30, 25 years ago, we had a NES, we were roaming around the fields and groves of our 600 souls hometown, played hide & seek on the graveyard - and uncounted hours of 9-Men Morris, in Germany known as Mühle (Mills).

We got so good at it, we tried ways to make it more challenging, adding pieces, drawing up larger and more complex boards to play on.

It was the first classic board game I teached to my kids when they were around 3 or 4.

Now, last week, another summer holiday, but completely different circumstances, I sat at our board game table (after we moved earlier this year, we eat in our kitchen most of the time and we can keep our crafting projects and games laying around in the living room) and just rolled a dice and put it on the five-sided Morris board I had engraved on an IKEA acacia cutting board.

I invested a few hours, played a lot against myself, asked my wife to join me for a few rounds and I finished the rules just yesterday.

Why you should play it:

9-Dice Morris is the obvious further development and marriage of two ancient game objects, the dice and the 9-Men Morris game, I believe was played for more than 10.000 years.

The usage of dice instead of simple tokens adds layers of complexity and psychological elements of more modern games of strategy and tactics, while the dice placement mechanic feels not tagged on but very organic.

I won't play a game of boring old 9-Men Morris anymore!

What is needed:

• The ruleset, published under CC licence, able to be downloaded here.
• 9 white six-sided dice
• 9 black six-sided dice
• 9-Men Morris board or alternatively the five-sided Morris board I recommend

The five-sided Morris board gives more room and enhances the game play a bit, without dragging it out for too long.

I am eager for your ideas and suggestions!

9-Dice Morris (or Würfelmühle)  © 2025 by Norman Eschenfelder is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

On the use of LLM and GAN for creative work:

The use of Large Language Models and Generative Adversial Networks should be understood as assistance and streamlining of organisational content that allows to focus on the creative decisions and work itself.

I will never let "artificial intelligence" be the ideamaker, -giver. It is perfectly reasonable to have given suggestions, translations and corrections. LLM and GAN should be understood as cocreators, not just tools. You would always name a cocreator and don't just steal their input.

In this project ChatGPT 4o was assisting in the mockup illustration and wording suggestions.