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A variety of practical problems can be modeled by the decision-making process in multi-player games where a group of self-interested players aim at optimizing their own local objectives, while the objectives depend on the actions taken by…

Consider the following game. We are given a tree $T$ and two players (say) Alice and Bob who alternately colour an edge of a tree (using one of $k$ colours). If all edges of the tree get coloured, then Alice wins else Bob wins. Game…

The Game of Cycles, introduced by Su (2020), is played on a simple connected planar graph together with its bounded cells, and players take turns marking edges with arrows according to a sink-source rule that gives the game a topological…

We consider zero-sum stochastic games with perfect information and finitely many states and actions. The payoff is computed by a function which associates to each infinite sequence of states and actions a real number. We prove that if the…

We introduce a 2-player game played on an infinite grid, initially empty, where each player in turn chooses a vertex and colours it. The first player aims to create some pattern from a target set, while the second player aims to prevent it.…

In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…

Balls-and-bins games have been a wildly successful tool for modeling load balancing problems. In this paper, we study a new scenario, which we call the ball recycling game, defined as follows: Throw m balls into n bins i.i.d. according to a…

We investigate the combinatorial game Slime Trail.This game is played on a graph with a starting piece in a node. Each player's objective is to reach one of their own goal nodes. Every turn the current player moves the piece and deletes the…

We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…

The centipede game is a two-player non-zero-sum game. Each turn, a player can choose whether they want to take or pass a growing reward. The classical, rational solution of this game shows defection in the first round, when in reality,…

The transitivity of preferences is one of the basic assumptions used in the theory of games and decisions. It is often equated with rationality of choice and is considered useful in building rankings. Intransitive preferences are considered…

We consider infinite-state turn-based stochastic games of two players, Box and Diamond, who aim at maximizing and minimizing the expected total reward accumulated along a run, respectively. Since the total accumulated reward is unbounded,…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…

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…

We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…

In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…

Randomized mechanisms can have good normative properties compared to their deterministic counterparts. However, randomized mechanisms are problematic in several ways such as in their verifiability. We propose here to derandomize such…

We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…

The online Ramsey turnaround game is a game between two players, Builder and Painter, on a board of $n$ vertices using $3$ colors, for a fixed graph $H$ on at most $n$ vertices. The goal of Painter is to force a monochromatic copy of $H$,…