Related papers: Sprouts game on compact surfaces

Euclid is a well known two-player impartial combinatorial game. A position in Euclid is a pair of positive integers and the players move alternately by subtracting a positive integer multiple of one of the integers from the other integer…

The game of Knockout is a classic playground game played with two basketballs. This paper uses a Markov process to analyze each player's probability of winning the game given their starting position in line and shooting percentages,…

Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…

We consider two-player games played on finite graphs equipped with costs on edges and introduce two winning conditions, cost-parity and cost-Streett, which require bounds on the cost between requests and their responses. Both conditions…

The radius-$r$ splitter game is played on a graph $G$ between two players: Splitter and Connector. In each round, Connector selects a vertex $v$, and the current game arena is restricted to the radius-$r$ neighborhood of $v$. Then Splitter…

We consider a two-player search game on a tree $T$. One vertex (unknown to the players) is randomly selected as the target. The players alternately guess vertices. If a guess $v$ is not the target, then both players are informed in which…

We introduce a two-player game, in which each player extends a given sequence by picking a free element in a domain D of the real line. The aim of the players is to control the parity of the number of transpositions necessary to put the…

This paper analyzes Shinohara Rock-Paper-Scissors (RPS), a variant of the classic RPS game introduced by board game designer Yoshiteru Shinohara. Players compete against a host who always plays rock, so players choose either rock or paper.…

We analyze a game introduced by Andy Niedermaier, where $p$ players take turns throwing a dart at a dartboard. A player is eliminated unless his dart lands closer to the center than all previously thrown darts, in which case he goes to the…

We introduce a topological combinatorial game called the Link Smoothing Game. The game is played on the shadow of a link diagram and legal moves consist of smoothing precrossings. One player's goal is to keep the diagram connected while the…

The game "Spot It!" is played with a deck of cards in which every pair of cards has exactly one matching symbol and the aim is to be the fastest at finding the match. It is known that finite projective planes correspond to decks in which…

We propose the ``Competing Salesmen Problem'' (CSP), a 2-player competitive version of the classical Traveling Salesman Problem. This problem arises when considering two competing salesmen instead of just one. The concern for a shortest…

The relationship between topology and dynamics of complex systems has motivated continuing interest from the scientific community. In the present work, we address this interesting topic from the perspective of simple games, involving two…

Peg solitaire is classically a one-player game played on a grid board containing pegs. The goal of the game is to have a single peg remaining on the board by sequentially jumping with a peg over an adjacent peg onto an empty cell while…

We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…

The game of Spot it(R) is based on an order 7 finite projective plane. This article presents a solitaire challenge: extract an order 7 affine plane and arrange those 49 cards into a square such that the symmetries of the affine and…

We consider random-turn positional games, introduced by Peres, Schramm, Sheffield and Wilson in 2007. A $p$-random-turn positional game is a two-player game, played the same as an ordinary positional game, except that instead of alternating…

Pursuit-evasion games, such as the game of Revolutionaries and Spies, are a simplified model for network security. In the game we consider in this paper, a team of $r$ revolutionaries tries to hold an unguarded meeting consisting of $m$…

We consider the $n\times n$ game of Phutball. It is shown that, given an arbitrary position of stones on the board, it is a PSPACE-hard problem to determine whether the specified player can win the game, regardless of the opponent's choices…

Games on graphs provide a natural and powerful model for reactive systems. In this paper, we consider generalized reachability objectives, defined as conjunctions of reachability objectives. We first prove that deciding the winner in such…