Related papers: Misere Hackenbush is NP-Hard
We study a two-person game based on the well-studied brushing process on graphs. Players Min and Max alternately place brushes on the vertices of a graph. When a vertex accumulates at least as many brushes as its degree, it sends one brush…
For an NP intersect coNP function g of the Nisan-Wigderson type and a string b outside its range we consider a two player game on a common input a to the function. One player, a computationally limited Student, tries to find a bit of g(a)…
We study a cooperative game in which each member of a team of $N$ players, wearing coloured hats and situated at the vertices of a cycle graph $C_N$, is guessing their own hat colour merely on the basis of observing the hats worn by their…
The region select game, introduced by Ayaka Shimizu, Akio Kawauchi and Kengo Kishimoto, is a game that is played on knot diagrams whose crossings are endowed with two colors. The game is based on the region crossing change moves that induce…
The Colouring problem asks whether the vertices of a graph can be coloured with at most $k$ colours for a given integer $k$ in such a way that no two adjacent vertices receive the same colour. A graph is $(H_1,H_2)$-free if it has no…
We play a variation of Nim on stacks of tokens. Take your favorite increasing sequence of positive integers and color the tokens according to the following rule. Each token on a level that corresponds to a number in the sequence is colored…
We study biased {\em orientation games}, in which the board is the complete graph $K_n$, and Maker and Breaker take turns in directing previously undirected edges of $K_n$. At the end of the game, the obtained graph is a tournament. Maker…
We present a edge-coloured analogue of the duality theorem for transitive tournaments and directed paths. Given a edge-coloured path $P$ whose edges alternate blue and red, we construct a edge-coloured graph $D$ so that for any…
This paper considers a natural ruleset for playing a partisan combinatorial game on a directed graph, which we call Digraph Placement. Given a digraph $G$ with a not necessarily proper $2$-coloring of $V(G)$, the Digraph Placement game…
We expand the theory of pebbling to graphs with weighted edges. In a weighted pebbling game, one player distributes a set amount of weight on the edges of a graph and his opponent chooses a target vertex and places a configuration of…
Motivated by understanding non-strict and strict pure strategy equilibria in network anti-coordination games, we define notions of stable and, respectively, strictly stable colorings in graphs. We characterize the cases when such colorings…
We prove PSPACE-hardness for fifteen games in the Super Mario Bros. 2D platforming video game series. Previously, only the original Super Mario Bros. was known to be PSPACE-hard (FUN 2016), though several of the games we study were known to…
We consider three variants of a partisan combinatorial game between two players, Left and Right, played on an undirected simple graph. Left is able to delete vertices (and incident edges) while Right is able to delete edges. This natural…
Consider a game played on the edge set of the infinite clique by two players, Builder and Painter. In each round, Builder chooses an edge and Painter colours it red or blue. Builder wins by creating either a red copy of $G$ or a blue copy…
We introduce a new notion of resilience for constraint satisfaction problems, with the goal of more precisely determining the boundary between NP-hardness and the existence of efficient algorithms for resilient instances. In particular, we…
We present new results on approximate colourings of graphs and, more generally, approximate H-colourings and promise constraint satisfaction problems. First, we show NP-hardness of colouring $k$-colourable graphs with $\binom{k}{\lfloor…
This paper describes the design process for the cybersecurity serious game 'PeriHack'. Publicly released under a CC (BY-NC-SA) license, PeriHack is a board and card game for two players or teams that simulates the struggle between a red…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
An edge-colored graph G is rainbow connected if any two vertices are connected by a path whose edges have distinct colors. The rainbow connectivity of a connected graph G, denoted rc(G), is the smallest number of colors that are needed in…
Consider an undirected graph modeling a social network, where the vertices represent users, and the edges do connections among them. In the competitive diffusion game, each of a number of players chooses a vertex as a seed to propagate…