Related papers: Variations on Narrow Dots-and-Boxes and Dots-and-T…

We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…

We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…

Dots-and-Boxes is a popular children's game whose winning strategies have been studied by Berlekamp, Conway, Guy, and others. In this article we consider two variations, Dots-and-Triangles and Dots-and-Polygons, both of which utilize the…

We answer the question of when a new point can be added in a continuous way to configurations of $n$ distinct points in a closed ball of arbitrary dimension. We show that this is possible given an ordered configuration of $n$ points if and…

We give very simple algorithms for best play in the simplest kind of Dots & Boxes endgames: those that consist entirely of loops and long chains. In every such endgame we compute the margin of victory, assuming both players maximize the…

We study two-player games with alternating moves played on infinite trees. Our main focus is on the case where the trees are full (regular) and the winning set is open (with respect to the product topology on the tree). Gale and Stewart…

Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…

At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…

The usual $n$-in-a-row game is a positional game in which two player alternately claim points in $\bb{Z}^2$ with the winner being the first player to claim $n$ consecutive points in a line. We consider a variant of the game, suggested by…

For a topological space $X$ and a point $x \in X$, consider the following game -- related to the property of $X$ being countably tight at $x$. In each inning $n\in\omega$, the first player chooses a set $A_n$ that clusters at $x$, and then…

We consider playing the game of Tic-Tac-Toe on block designs BIBD($v, k, \lambda$) and transversal designs TD($k, n$). Players take turns choosing points and the first player to complete a block wins the game. We show that triple systems,…

Dots-and-Boxes is a child's game which remains analytically unsolved. We implement and evolve artificial neural networks to play this game, evaluating them against simple heuristic players. Our networks do not evaluate or predict the final…

We analyze a coin-based game with two players where, before starting the game, each player selects a string of length $n$ comprised of coin tosses. They alternate turns, choosing the outcome of a coin toss according to specific rules. As a…

We consider a game with two piles, in which two players take turn to add $a$ or $b$ chips ($a$, $b$ are not necessarily positive) randomly and independently to their respective piles. The player who collects $n$ chips first wins the game.…

When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…

In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…

In this paper we describe several player preferences in games with $N \geq 2$ players, in particular the case $N = 3$, and use them to simplify game trees, using the game of Clobber as our example. We show that, using a fixed starting…

This paper is concerned with asymptotic behaviour of a repeated game of "odds and evens", with strategies of both players represented by finite automata. It is proved that, for every $n$, there is an automaton with $2^n \cdot…

We prove that Strings-and-Coins -- the combinatorial two-player game generalizing the dual of Dots-and-Boxes -- is strongly PSPACE-complete on multigraphs. This result improves the best previous result, NP-hardness, argued in Winning Ways.…

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…