Related papers: Morpion Solitaire 5D: a new upper bound of 121 on …
Morpion Solitaire is a popular single player game, performed with paper and pencil. Due to its large state space (on the order of the game of Go) traditional search algorithms, such as MCTS, have not been able to find good solutions. A…
Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…
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…
The isolation game is played on a graph $G$ by two players who take turns playing a vertex such that if $X$ is the set of already played vertices, then a vertex can be selected only if it dominates a vertex from a nontrivial component of $G…
We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
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…
Chopsticks is a game played by two players where they start with one finger raised on each hand. On their turn, each player moves by pointing an attacking hand at one of their opponent's hands. The number of fingers on the pointed hand…
We study the classical game of peg solitaire when diagonal jumps are allowed. We prove that on many boards, one can begin from a full board with one peg missing, and finish with one peg anywhere on the board. We then consider the problem of…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…
Peg solitaire is a game generalized to connected graphs by Beeler and Hoilman. In the game pegs are placed on all but one vertex. If $xyz$ form a 3-vertex path and $x$ and $y$ each have a peg but $z$ does not, then we can remove the pegs at…
"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
We study the Torus Puzzle, a solitaire game in which the elements of an input $m \times n$ matrix need to be rearranged into a target configuration via a sequence of unit rotations (i.e., circular shifts) of rows and/or columns. Amano et…
Consider a situation with $n$ agents or players where some of the players form a coalition with a certain collective objective. Simple games are used to model systems that can decide whether coalitions are successful (winning) or not…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a variant of the well known tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) board game. Two players compete to win three aligned "fields", each of them being a tic-tac-toe game. Each move determines which field the next player…
In the domination game studied here, Dominator and Staller alternately choose a vertex of a graph $G$ and take it into a set $D$. The number of vertices dominated by the set $D$ must increase in each single turn and the game ends when $D$…
Clobber is a new two-player board game. In this paper, we introduce the one-player variant Solitaire Clobber where the goal is to remove as many stones as possible from the board by alternating white and black moves. We show that a…