The history of Nine Men's Morris
Yuego is a modern, playable-online take on a family of board games that has entertained people for thousands of years — long before chess as we know it today even existed. It goes by many names depending on the country and the era: Nine Men's Morris in English, Mühle in German, el juego del molino in Spanish — all pointing at the same core idea: place pieces, form mills, capture your opponent's.
A board carved in stone over 3,000 years ago
The oldest known trace of a board like this is carved into a stone slab at the temple of Kurna, in Egypt, dated to around 1400 BCE. It's far from an isolated case: similar boards have turned up carved into the steps of Roman amphitheaters, into the steps of the Acropolis in Athens, and even into the timbers of a Viking ship, the Gokstad, buried over a thousand years ago.
From medieval cloisters to English fields
During the Middle Ages, the game spread across Europe. In England it was popular enough that people played it outdoors, cutting the lines straight into the turf — a custom well-known enough that Shakespeare mentions it directly in A Midsummer Night's Dream, complaining that these grass boards were left "filled up with mud" by the bad weather. Hand-carved boards have also been found in the stonework of several English cathedrals, likely the work of some bored monk or mason between shifts.
Where does the name "Morris" come from?
Despite appearances, the English name has nothing to do with Morris dancing. The most widely accepted theory traces it back to the Latin merellus, which simply meant "game piece" or "counter" — the same root, incidentally, that gives the game one of its old Spanish names, "las marras."
Many variants, one shared idea
Over the centuries, versions with different numbers of pieces and concentric rings on the board have existed: from the simplest, with three pieces per player, all the way to the classic nine-piece version played on three concentric squares, with a six-piece variant on two squares in between — which is, as it happens, exactly the one Yuego follows. They all share the same core: place, move, form mills, capture.
From stone to screen
The fact that a game with over three thousand years of history can be played today online, from a phone, against someone on the other side of the world, says a lot about how well the original design held up. Yuego doesn't change a single one of those centuries-old rules — it just gives them a digital board and, thanks to the open matchmaking queue, an opponent waiting at any hour of the day.