Southern Africa · Strategy Game · 2 Players

How to Play Morabaraba

Morabaraba — "the mill" in Sesotho, and Mmela in Setswana — is a two-player mill game of the Sotho and Tswana peoples of Southern Africa. Each player commands twelve "cows." You build mills — lines of three — to pick off your opponent's herd, until they can no longer fight back. It belongs to the worldwide family of mill games (often called Twelve Men's Morris), but its four corner diagonals give it a character all its own.

The Board

Morabaraba is played on 24 points arranged as three nested squares — outer, middle, and inner — joined by cross-arms at the midpoint of each side. Pieces sit on the points (the corners and the midpoints of each square), and they move along the lines that connect them. Crucially, Morabaraba adds four diagonal lines running from each outer corner inward to the inner square. Those corner diagonals are the game's signature and create extra mills and routes that the plain Nine/Twelve Men's Morris board does not have.

  A7------D7------G7
  | \      |     / |
  |  B6----D6----F6 |
  |  | \   |   / |  |
  |  |  C5-D5-E5 |  |
  A4-B4-C4    E4-F4-G4
  |  |  C3-D3-E3 |  |
  |  | /   |   \ |  |
  |  B2----D2----F2 |
  | /      |     \ |
  A1------D1------G1

  (the centre point d4 is empty —
   no piece ever sits there)

Setting Up

Each player has 12 cows, held "in hand" off the board.
The board starts empty.
Light moves first.

The Three Phases

Phase 1 — Placement

Players take turns placing one cow on any empty point. This continues until all 24 cows (12 each) have been placed. If a placement completes a mill, that player immediately shoots an opponent cow (see below) — including the very first mill of the game.

Phase 2 — Movement

Once every cow is on the board, players switch to moving: slide one of your cows along a line to an adjacent connected empty point. Cows never jump. As in placement, completing a new mill lets you shoot.

Phase 3 — Flying

The moment a player is reduced to exactly 3 cows, those cows gain the power to "fly": they may move to any empty point on the board, ignoring the lines. Only the side that is down to 3 cows may fly — the other side still moves one step at a time.

Mills & Shooting

A mill is three of your own cows lined up along any of the board's straight lines — a side of a square, a cross-arm, or one of the four corner diagonals. Whenever you form a new mill, you remove ("shoot") one of your opponent's cows.

Shooting rules:

You normally may not shoot a cow that is part of a completed mill.
Exception: if all of your opponent's cows are in mills, then any of them may be shot.
Forming two mills at once still lets you shoot only one cow.
A cow you have just moved away from a mill may not immediately slide back to re-form the same mill on your very next turn (no endless mill-flicking).

How to Win

Reduce your opponent to 2 cows. With only two cows, no mill is possible, so that player loses.
Trap your opponent. If, on their turn, a player has no legal move, they lose.
Draw. Once either side is down to 3 cows, if 10 moves pass with no cow being shot, the game is declared a draw — a stalemate that neither herd can break.

Strategy Tips

Use the diagonals. The four corner diagonals are unique to Morabaraba — an outer corner can be part of three different mills, so corners are valuable.
Build a "swinging" mill. Set up two mills that share a cow, so you can move one cow back and forth between them — opening and re-closing a mill to shoot every turn. (Remember you can't immediately reverse a single move to re-form the same mill.)
Hold the junctions. The points where four lines meet (the side-midpoints of the middle square, like B4 and F4) give the most mobility and the most mill chances.
Don't fly too eagerly. Reaching 3 cows lets you fly, but you are one shot from losing — flying is a last-ditch fight, not a goal.

Cultural History

Morabaraba — "the mill" in Sesotho, and Mmela in Setswana — is a strategy game of the Sotho and Tswana peoples of Southern Africa. It is traditionally said to have been played by herdboys watching their families' cattle, who would scratch the board into the ground and use stones as their "cows." Across the region, cattle are the great measure of wealth and status, and that pastoral world is written into the very name of the pieces.

Boards worn into rock have sometimes been offered as evidence of the game's long history in Southern Africa. Scholars urge caution here: a precise age is difficult to establish, and some carved "boards" turn out to be the mancala game Moruba rather than Morabaraba. What is not in doubt is that the game has been played for generations and is still widely loved.

Today Morabaraba is recognised as a competitive mind sport. In South Africa it is governed by Mind Sports South Africa (MSSA), which maintains the standardised tournament rules — the place-then-move-then-fly structure, the mill-and-shoot mechanic, and the draw rule — used in the version you can play here.

Play Morabaraba Free Online

No download. No account. Play in your browser right now.

Play Morabaraba →