At the Hoggetowne Faire we taught everyone who visited our Gaming Tent how to play two historical games: Nine Man Morris and Tesserae. Both games date back to ancient Rome and continued to be played well into colonial times. Soldiers during the Revolutionary War played these games to pass the time, just like the men of the Roman Legions did!
Nine Man Morris
Nine Man Morris is a strategy game for two players that dates back at least to the Roman Empire. The game is known by a variety of names, including Nine Men's Morris, Mills, The Mill Game, Merels, Merrills, Merelles, and Ninepenny Marl. In North America it has even gone by the name Cowboy Checkers and the board was sometimes printed on the back of checkerboards. The names (except Cowboy Checkers!) derive from Latin. "Merels", no matter how you spell it, derives from the Latin word for gamepiece - "merellus". "Mills " and "Morris" come from "Miles", the Latin word for soldier. So Nine Man Morris essentially means "Nine Soldiers".
A game of Nine Man Morris can take anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour. Players take turns trying to form their own men into "mills" - a horizontal or vertical line of three men in a row. Each time you succeed in forming a Mill, you get to remove one of your opponent's players from the board. The player who succeeds in reducing his opponent to two men is the winner. Like Tic-Tac-Toe, if both players use perfect strategy, the game should result in a draw. The rules are simple, the strategy is not!
Learn more about Nine Man Morris:
The Hyland House Museum - Nine Men Morris Game
Masters Traditional Games - The Rules of Merels or Nine Mens Morris
YouTube - How to Play Nine Men's Morris
Mills/Nine Mens Morris on Apple Store
Mills/Nine Men's Morris App on Google Play
Tesserae
The word "Tesserae" is Latin for dice (the singular is "tessera"). The earliest dice-type games were played with the knucklebones of sheep and goats, called "Tali", which had six clearly distinguishable sides. The two shortest sides were also rounded, however, so the knucklebones almost never landed that way. The earliest manufactured dice then, only had four numbered sides and two blank ones, in imitation of the original knucklebones. By the 1st-2nd century BCE polygonal dices with mesh numbers marked on all six faces, called Tesserae, had become popular. They were made out of a wide variety of materials including wood, bone, antlers, bronze, lead, stone, and even amber and semi-precious jewels for the rich. Just like the dice we use today, the opposite sides of Roman dice always added up to seven.
Although there were many different variations on the rules of the game, Tali and Tesserae were played very much like the modern dice game of Yahtzee - the count of the dice was scored like poker hands to get a winner. A round consists of each player throwing the dice and the winner of that round was the person with the highest score. For a longer game, multiple rounds could be added together for a total score. The Tali or Tesserae were typically shaken and thrown from a cup, or they could be dropped through a dice tower. Bets were placed in the same way they are in a modern game of poker. Although some Roman wall paintings seem to depict that these games were played with sets of three dice, others depictions show two or four dice being used.
Learn more about how to play Tesserae:
The Getty Museum - Ancient Games