The board game Nine Men Morris or Mill.
The game has also been called cowboy checkers and is sometimes printed on the back of checkerboards. Nine men's morris is a solved game, that is, a game whose optimal strategy has been calculated. It has been shown that with perfect play from both players, the game results in a draw.
The name Nine Men's Morris seems to have been originated by Shakespeare in his play, A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, Scene I), in which Titania refers to such a board by saying, “The nine men's morris is filled up with mud”. Nine Men's Morris carved into stone in the ruins of Byzantine church, St.28-Oct-2017
From written sources we know that the Vikings played “hnefatafl” and “nitavl” (Nine Men's Morris) and chess also appeared at the end of the Viking period.
Players continue to alternate moves, by moving a token to an adjacent dot. A token may not "jump" another token. Players continue to try to form mills and remove their opponent's tokens as in step one.
Nine Men's Morris is an ancient Egyptian game that is still a lot of fun to play. It's a two-player game played on a special grid. You can easily create your own board by drawing the grid on a piece of paper and using counters or components from other games.18-Feb-2021