Nine Men's Morris - Dokuz Tas 4+

Some Good, Some Bad, Some What

I’ve downloaded and played a lot of Nine Men’s Morris games. This is not the best of them, but neither is it the worst.

The most important good thing is that its AI is not completely stupid. This is an issue with at least 80% of the NMM apps I’ve tried, most of which seem to move at random. This one rarely makes obviously bad moves, and if I make one questionable move (as sometimes happens if one sets the game aside and comes back a while later), the AI recognises that and takes full advantage of it. That’s well beyond most NMM apps’ AIs at their most difficult setting. Still, it’s far from great, and I can beat it reliably if I’m paying attention. And it can be absurdly slow at times — which is one way to make me lose my attention! The few apps I’ve encountered with *good* AIs are also quite a bit faster.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing to customise here. The app gives different names to its AI players, which might suggest different settings for each, but they all play pretty much the same. You can’t select which one you get anyway (although you keep the same opponent until you go back to the home screen). So it’s a “one size fits some” sort of challenge.

One thing that does really irritate me is that the human player *always* goes first. Whether you’re going first makes a huge difference in NMM! I wouldn’t mind if the first move alternates from one game to the next, but never playing second is a problem.

The aesthetic is nice and clean, though the board is hard to see in bright light. I really like the way that mills are marked for as long as they remain; this is a nice reminder that you can’t take a piece from them if others are available. I haven’t seen that feature in any other NMM apps, and I really like it.

On the other hand, the default method for moving pieces is to double-tap them to select them. That’s just bizarre, and I’m glad that you can switch to a more intuitive drag-and-drop interface (about the only thing you *can* change other than to toggle the sounds on and off). A single-tap select makes far more sense; and anyway lots of board game apps can detect which the user is doing and don’t need to be switched manually.

There’s no undo. This is not altogether bad, as it makes you live with any bad moves you make. But there is a back-arrow button that could easily be mistaken for an undo, which instead returns you to the home screen, aborting the game, without confirming that you want to do that.

The game claims to make use of Game Centre, but although Game Centre recognises me, I don’t see my name anywhere on the leaderboards. I’m not sure what others have done differently.

The interface does have one bug: the little clock icon that indicates when the AI is thinking (which is a nice touch!) seems to grow an additional pair of hands every time it starts, only resetting when you return to the home screen. This means that, if you play a few rematches, it’s not long until that clock has a truly hysterical number of hands going around! I find this amusing, personally.

Anyway, like I said, far from the worst NMM app out there. Allow the player to go second, fix the Game Centre, and offer a tougher AI, and it’ll easily be one of the better ones.