Related papers: Bejeweled, Candy Crush and other Match-Three Games…
We prove that playing Candy Crush to achieve a given score in a fixed number of swaps is NP-hard.
We study the complexity of a particular class of board games, which we call `slide and merge' games. Namely, we consider 2048 and Threes, which are among the most popular games of their type. In both games, the player is required to slide…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
Recently, due to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones, mobile puzzle games have experienced a huge increase in their popularity. A successful puzzle has to be both captivating and challenging, and it has been suggested that this…
We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…
We show that the maximum success probability of players sharing quantum entanglement in a two-player game with classical questions of logarithmic length and classical answers of constant length is NP-hard to approximate to within constant…
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
In this paper, we give simple NP-hardness reductions for three popular video games. The first is Baba Is You, an award winning 2D block puzzle game with the key premise being the ability to rewrite the rules of the game. The second is Fez,…
We analyze the computational complexity of the popular computer games Threes!, 1024!, 2048 and many of their variants. For most known versions expanded to an m x n board, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether a given starting…
We investigate two types of query games played on a graph, pair queries and edge queries. We concentrate on investigating the two associated graph parameters for binomial random graphs, and showing that determining any of the two parameters…
Concurrent multi-player games with $\omega$-regular objectives are a standard model for systems that consist of several interacting components, each with its own objective. The standard solution concept for such games is Nash Equilibrium,…
Matching games naturally generalize assignment games, a well-known class of cooperative games. Interest in matching games has grown recently due to some breakthrough results and new applications. This state-of-the-art survey provides an…
Tetravex is a widely played one person computer game in which you are given $n^2$ unit tiles, each edge of which is labelled with a number. The objective is to place each tile within a $n$ by $n$ square such that all neighbouring edges are…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
We study the problem of deciding the winner of reachability switching games for zero-, one-, and two-player variants. Switching games provide a deterministic analogue of stochastic games. We show that the zero-player case is NL-hard, the…
We consider one-round games between a classical verifier and two provers who share entanglement. We show that when the constraints enforced by the verifier are `unique' constraints (i.e., permutations), the value of the game can be well…
Wordle is a single-player word-guessing game where the goal is to discover a secret word $w$ that has been chosen from a dictionary $D$. In order to discover $w$, the player can make at most $\ell$ guesses, which must also be words from…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
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…
In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the…