Mühle

The same game, the same board

Mühle is simply the German word for a mill, and the game is the standard nine-piece one: three squares joined at the midpoints of their sides, twenty-four points, nine pieces each, place then move, three in a row lets you take an enemy piece. Nothing about the board or the rules differs from the English game, so anything you learn here transfers exactly.

It is a household game across German-speaking Europe in a way it is not in Britain or America — the kind of board that is in the cupboard rather than the museum. That matters if you are learning it: the average opponent has played it since childhood and will punish a rushed first mill without having to think about why.

Zwickmühle: the word worth knowing

German has a specific word for the winning tactic that English has to describe in a sentence. A Zwickmühle is the double mill — two mills arranged so that one piece shuttles between them, closing a mill and taking a piece on every single move.

The word has escaped the board. In ordinary German, being in einer Zwickmühle means being caught in a dilemma where every option loses something, which is a precise description of what it feels like to face one across a board. If you want one thing from this page, it is that the tactic is famous enough in German to have become a figure of speech — and that is a fair measure of how decisive it is.

The shape is worth getting right, because most descriptions get it wrong. Two mills that share a piece are nearly worthless: moving the shared piece breaks both at once. A real Zwickmühle uses two mills that share no piece, each missing one point, with those two points next to each other.

Flying, and what German clubs do about it

The one rule that varies between traditions is whether a player down to three pieces may jump to any empty point rather than only an adjacent one. Casual play generally allows it, because it keeps a losing position alive. Competitive play generally does not, because three pieces that can fly are very hard to finish off and the ending turns into a formality.

You can play either way here. Games against the computer and two-player games on one device both let you turn flying off, and it is worth doing once: an endgame you thought was a comfortable draw usually is not.