When I was a young boy in the 7th grade, my friend Henry and I would often partake in this game for fun on the bus ride home from school. Throughout these daily plays, my friendship with Henry grew, and I will never forget the bond we created. Not only this, but I used to play this game in class which allowed me to show it to others and spark friendships that I have to this day. Thanks to Nine Men’s Morris, I have made lifelong friendships with people I never before would have known.

Okay, so, when I first found out about Mills from a festival I went to, I LOVED the game. I wanted to play it a lot. So I downloaded this app, started up an online game… and got destroyed. That’s okay, I’m just learning! So I started up ANOTHER online game, and got destroyed THERE as well. That’s okay, two good players in a row can’t be that bad. But I just kept losing game after game. And honestly, yes, I’m bad at Mills. But at the same time, the players I get matched with are people who have been playing for years, with much more experience and ratings around 1300. I actually asked one of them through the chat, “How long have you been playing?” They simply replied with “Yes.” It’s really demoralizing to just keep losing games. I’m pretty sure that either there are just no players on the app that aren’t masters, or the matching system isn’t good. Either way, I’ve lost every open seek I’ve made so far. And the “unfortunately you lost the match” popup started to seem really condescending, because of how much it kept appearing. I won one game against a 900, but this was not in auto-match, I had to go out of my way to spend a long time manually finding a low-rated opponent who was online and would accept. I tied one game from some miracle as well. But the rest? All brutal, decisive losses, against people who are way, WAY too good for me. I really want to like Mills. I really, really do. It’s a fun game, and I want to have fun, improve and learn and play against others at my own level. But every time I go into auto-match, I get paired up with someone who is very clearly going to steamroll me. As a new player who isn’t at all good at the game, there aren’t many opponents out there at my level, and it’s super frustrating to just get decimated in basically every game I play.So, yeah. Good game, and I REALLY want to like it. But the fact that the game seems to set me up to fail is really discouraging and frustrating.

I like this game and have tried 3 different apps before this one. They were all ridiculously easy. This one is better — could still use one higher difficulty level — but every few games when you click the X to get the ad off the screen, the whole screen goes black and nothing works. Fix that, and I will bump higher.

This is one game that does not lend itself to an easy solution. There are strategies but you have to think about every game. I lose more than I win, humbling.