English

Quoridor is PSPACE-Hard

Computational Complexity 2026-05-22 v1

Abstract

Quoridor is an award-winning abstract strategy game designed by Mirko Marchesi and published in 1997. Similar games include Maze Attack, Blockade (also known as Cul-de-sac), and Pinko Pallino. In line with chess, checkers, Go, and other classic combinatorial games, Quoridor is a turn-based, deterministic, perfect-information game played on a square grid. We show that it is PSPACE-complete to determine whether a given player has a winning strategy in a given Quoridor position on a board with size n×nn \times n. We prove this by reduction from Gpos(POS CNF), a Boolean formula game originally defined in 1978 by T. Schaefer.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.22747,
  title  = {Quoridor is PSPACE-Hard},
  author = {Marius Drop and Benjamin G. Rin and Finn van der Velde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.22747},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 8 figures