Morabaraba

A different board, not a different name

Morabaraba is the most important thing on this list, because unlike Mühle or merels it is not the same game under another word. It is played on the twelve-piece board: the same twenty-four points, but with four diagonal lines added joining the corners of the three squares.

Those four lines change the game more than they look. They add four more possible mills, and they give the twelve corner points a third neighbour. In the nine-piece European game the corners are the weakest squares on the board — two neighbours each, and a piece parked there can be shut in by covering both. On the diagonal board they are live.

Each side has twelve pieces rather than nine, which means that when placing finishes, twenty-four pieces sit on twenty-four points and nobody can move at all unless a capture has already opened a gap. The placing phase therefore carries far more of the game than it does here.

Cows

The pieces are cows. That is not a decorative translation — the vocabulary of the game is pastoral throughout, and it reflects a game that was played with stones in the ground long before it was sold in a box.

It is played seriously. South Africa has organised competition with national structures behind it, and there is a body of opening theory that does not simply carry over from the European nine-piece game, because the diagonals and the twelfth piece change which points are worth taking.

Can you play it here?

Not yet. This site implements the nine-piece board only, and it will say so on the variants page until that changes rather than listing a board you cannot open. If we add a second board, this is the one — it is the most-played member of the family that is not the standard game.

In the meantime, the nine-piece game is the closest thing available, and the core skills carry: build two threats at once, do not rush the first mill, and count how many legal moves your opponent has rather than how many pieces.