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A checkers-like model game with a simplified set of rules is studied through extensive simulations of agents with different expertise and strategies. The introduction of complementary strategies, in a quite general way, provides a tool to…
The game of memory is played with a deck of n pairs of cards. The cards in each pair are identical. The deck is shuffled and the cards laid face down. A move consists of flipping over first one card then another. The cards are removed from…
We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…
Nim is a well-known combinatorial game in which two players alternately remove stones from distinct piles. A player who removes the last stone wins under the normal play rule, while a player loses under the mis\`ere play rule. In this…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We prove that the single-player game clobber is solvable in linear time when played on a line or on a cycle. For this purpose, we show that this game is equivalent to an optimization problem on a set of words defined by seven classes of…
This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games, covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected…
In the {\em Musical Chairs} game $MC(n,m)$ a team of $n$ players plays against an adversarial {\em scheduler}. The scheduler wins if the game proceeds indefinitely, while termination after a finite number of rounds is declared a win of the…
Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…
A recent paper by Bhatia, Chin, Mani, and Mossel (2026) defined stochastic processes aimed at modeling the game of War for {\em two players} with $n$ cards. That paper showed that these models, assuming uniform random decks, are equivalent…
Given $n$ piles of tokens and a positive integer $k \leq n$, we study the following two impartial combinatorial games Nim$^1_{n, \leq k}$ and Nim$^1_{n, =k}$. In the first (resp. second) game, a player, by one move, chooses at least $1$ and…
We consider the following two-player game, parametrised by positive integers $n$ and $k$. The game is played between Painter and Builder, alternately taking turns, with Painter moving first. The game starts with the empty graph on $n$…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
We consider the problem of determining the minimum number of moves needed to solve a certain one-dimensional peg puzzle. Let N be a positive integer. The puzzle apparatus consists of a block with a single row of 2N+1 equally spaced holes…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Although computing the minimum…
This paper presents a study of restricted Nim with a pass. In the restricted Nim considered in this study, two players take turns and remove stones from the piles. In each turn, when the number of stones is m, each player is allowed to…