Related papers: Solitaire Chess is NP-complete

We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…

Normally a chess problem must have a unique solution, and is deemed unsound even if there are alternatives that differ only in the order in which the same moves are played. In an enumerative chess problem, the set of moves in the solution…

We prove that chess played on the infinite chessboard $\mathbb{Z}^2$ with infinitely many pieces is as powerful as it could possibly be, by showing that every open Gale-Stewart game with draws is strategically equivalent to some infinite…

The Solitaire cipher was designed by Bruce Schneier as a plot point in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. The cipher is intended to fit the archetype of a modern stream cipher whilst being implementable by hand using a standard…

Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…

In the Nikoli pencil-and-paper game Double Choco, a puzzle consists of an m $\times$ n grid of cells of white or gray color, separated by dotted lines where each cell possibly contains an integer. The goal is to partition the grid into…

In this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…

We study the complexity of symmetric assembly puzzles: given a collection of simple polygons, can we translate, rotate, and possibly flip them so that their interior-disjoint union is line symmetric? On the negative side, we show that the…

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…

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…

In this paper, we study the cooperative card game, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, is a game based on traditional trick-taking card games,…

We consider a two player simultaneous-move game where the two players each select any permissible $n$-sided die for a fixed integer $n$. A player wins if the outcome of his roll is greater than that of his opponent. Remarkably, for $n>3$,…

In the Binary Networked Public Goods game, every player needs to decide if she participates in a public project whose utility is shared equally by the community. We study the problem of deciding if there exists a pure strategy Nash…

Morpion Solitaire is a pencil-and-paper game for a single player. A move in this game consists of putting a cross at a lattice point and then drawing a line segment that passes through exactly five consecutive crosses. The objective is to…

Automatic chess problem or puzzle composition typically involves generating and testing various different positions, sometimes using particular piece sets. Once a position has been generated, it is then usually tested for positional…

We will describe a combinatorial game that models the problem of resolution of singularities of algebraic varieties over a field of characteristic zero. By giving a winning strategy for this game, we give another proof of the existence of…

The game of SET is a popular card game in which the objective is to form Sets using cards from a special deck. In this paper we study single- and multi-round variations of this game from the computational complexity point of view and…

Modern board games are a rich source of interesting and new challenges for combinatorial problems. The game Nmbr9 is a solitaire style puzzle game using polyominoes. The rules of the game are simple to explain, but modelling the game…

In this paper we study a variant of the solitaire game Lights-Out, where the player's goal is to turn off a grid of lights. This variant is a two-player impartial game where the goal is to make the final valid move. This version is playable…

Consider a very simple class of (finite) games: after an initial move by nature, each player makes one move. Moreover, the players have common interests: at each node, all the players get the same payoff. We show that the problem of…