This is the best summary I could come up with:

Some 500 years ago, construction workers in the midst of building Ćmielów Castle in Poland carved a simple game board into a slab of the sandstone floor as a diversion for their leisure time.

According to archaeologist Tomasz Olszacki, it’s a two-person strategy board game called Mill, also known as Nine Men’s Morris, Merels, or “cowboy checkers” in North America.

The earliest-known Mill game board was found carved into the roofing slabs of an Egyptian temple at Kurna, which likely predates the Common Era.

And in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania talks about how “the nine men’s morris is filled up with mud”—perhaps a reference to the giant outdoor boards carved into medieval village greens.

Built sometime between 1519 and 1531 by a local nobleman named Krzysztof Szydłowiecki, the castle fell into Swedish hands in 1657 and was partially demolished in 1702.

But then it changed hands again in 2022, and archaeological work at the site resumed, leading to the game board’s discovery.

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