Tigadi (तिगड़ी) is a two-player board game from India, played on three concentric squares with 24 points. It is a variant of nine men’s morris — known in Hindi as नवकंकरी or नौ गोटी — with one important difference: the corner diagonals are real lines, so they carry both moves and captures. The name comes from the tigadi, a trio of your pieces on one line, which is what lets you capture.

How do you play Tigadi?

Each player has nine pieces, called gotis. You take turns placing them on any empty point until all eighteen are down. After that, you take turns sliding one goti to the next point along a drawn line. Whenever three of your gotis occupy one full line, you take an enemy goti off the board. Reduce your opponent to two gotis and you win.

A tigadi is three of one player’s gotis filling all three points of a single drawn line — the same idea as a mill in nine men’s morris. There are 20 such lines on this board: twelve around the three squares and eight along the spokes. Closing a tigadi captures exactly one enemy goti, no matter how many lines you complete at once.

Can a piece jump when you only have three left?

No. In Tigadi a goti always steps to the next intersection along a line — at nine pieces, at three, at two. There is no flying, hopping or jumping at any piece count. This is the biggest difference from the widely published nine men’s morris rules, where a player reduced to three pieces may move anywhere.

What happens if a player has no legal move?

They pass, and the turn goes back to their opponent. Being blocked is never a loss in Tigadi. Because the board is fully connected and every point has at least three neighbours, both players can never be stuck at the same time.

Is Tigadi the same as Nau Goti?

They are the same family of game. Nau goti means “nine pieces”, which is what each player starts with, and the game is also called नवकंकरी across parts of India. Elsewhere you will find it as nine men’s morris, mills, merels or morabaraba — though the diagonals and the no-jumping rule make this version distinct.

Can a tigadi capture more than once?

Yes, and this is how games are won. Move a goti out of a completed tigadi and back in on a later turn, and it counts again, capturing another enemy goti each time. Players call this a running tigadi, and setting one up is the strongest plan in the game.

Which pieces can I capture?

Any enemy goti that is not standing inside a completed tigadi of its own. Pieces inside an enemy tigadi are protected. If every one of your opponent’s gotis is inside a tigadi, that protection lapses and you may take any of them.

Can I play Tigadi online with a friend?

Yes. Create a room and you get a four-character code and a shareable link. Your friend opens the link on any device and you play in real time, with the server refereeing every move. You can also play on one device by passing it back and forth, or against the computer at three difficulty levels.

How does a game of Tigadi end in a draw?

Two ways. If the same position occurs three times with the same player to move, the game is drawn. So is a run of 100 turns with no capture at all. Both counters only start once every goti has been placed.

Tigadi vs Nine Men’s Morris — What’s Different

The short version

Tigadi is played on the twelve men’s morris board — the standard three rings plus four corner diagonals — but with nine pieces per player, and a piece never gains the ability to jump.

That single sentence is the whole difference. Everything below is the detail behind it.

Difference one: the board has diagonals

The standard nine men’s morris board is three concentric squares joined by four spokes through the midpoints of the sides. It has 24 points and 16 lines that can hold three pieces.

Wikipedia describes twelve men’s morris as the variant that "adds four diagonal lines to the board and gives each player twelve pieces". Tigadi takes the first half of that and not the second: the four corner diagonals are present and playable, but each player still has nine pieces.

	Nine men’s morris	Twelve men’s morris	Tigadi
Points	24	24	24
Corner diagonals	No	Yes	Yes
Lines that can hold three	16	20	20
Pieces each	9	12	9
Flying at three pieces	Usually	Usually	Never

The extra four lines change the board more than the number suggests. On a board without diagonals every point sits on exactly two lines. Add the diagonals and the corner points sit on three, while the side midpoints still sit on two — so the board stops being uniform, and the corners become the valuable squares.

Difference two: no flying, ever

Most published morris rules give a player reduced to three pieces the ability to move a piece to any empty point on the board, rather than one step along a line. It is variously called flying, hopping or jumping.

In Tigadi that never happens. A goti steps to an adjacent point along a drawn line at every stage of the game — with nine pieces, with three, with two.

This is not a house rule invented here. Wikipedia notes of the flying rule that "some rules sources say this is the way the game is played, some treat it as a variation, and some do not mention it at all." No-flying is one of the documented positions, not a deviation from a settled standard.

The consequence is that the endgame plays completely differently. With flying, a player down to three pieces can break any developing tigadi anywhere on the board, and the game tends towards a draw. Without it, position and mobility keep mattering right to the end — a trapped piece stays trapped, and a well-placed tigadi cannot be answered from across the board.

A smaller difference: blockade is not a loss

Many morris rule sets, including several traditional Indian descriptions, end the game against a player who has no legal move. In Tigadi that player simply passes and play continues.

This is safe rather than arbitrary: the board is connected and every point has at least three neighbours, so two players can never be stuck simultaneously. A pass always returns the turn to somebody able to move.

A note on the oldest boards

There is a pleasing footnote to the diagonal question. The boards most often cited as the earliest morris evidence — cut into roofing slabs at the temple at Kurna in Egypt — are described as including diagonal lines. R. C. Bell dated them to around 1400 BCE.

That dating is disputed, and properly so: Friedrich Berger observed that some of the Kurna diagrams carry Coptic crosses and concluded that "certainly they cannot be dated". So this is not evidence that the diagonal board is the older form. It is only a reminder that boards with diagonals have been around for as long as anyone has been arguing about morris boards at all.

Common questions

Is Tigadi the same as twelve men’s morris?

It uses the same board, but not the same game. Twelve men’s morris gives each player twelve pieces; Tigadi gives nine. With nine pieces on a 24-point board there is far more empty space, so the placing phase is a contest for the strong points rather than a scramble to fit everything in.

Why remove flying? Doesn’t it make the endgame unfair?

It makes the endgame decisive rather than fair-in-the-sense-of-drawish. With flying, a player down to three pieces can answer any threat anywhere, and well-played games tend to peter out. Without it, an advantage earned in the middle game actually converts, and being blocked is a real cost you have to play around.

Which version is the “correct” one?

Neither. Morris is thousands of years old and has no governing body; the rules vary by region and by century, and even the flying rule is treated as optional by many sources. Tigadi is one coherent, consistently applied set — stated in full so you know exactly what you are playing.

How Tigadi differs from nine men’s morris