Related papers: A handle is enough for a hard game of Pull
Voting theory has become increasingly integrated with computational social choice and multiagent systems. Computational complexity has been extensively used as a shield against manipulation of voting systems, however for several voting…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
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…
Weighted voting games are a well-known and useful class of succinctly representable simple games that have many real-world applications, e.g., to model collective decision-making in legislative bodies or shareholder voting. Among the…
For many voting rules, it is NP-hard to compute a successful manipulation. However, NP-hardness only bounds the worst-case complexity. Recent theoretical results suggest that manipulation may often be easy in practice. We study empirically…
We present and analyze PackIt!, a turn-based game consisting of packing rectangles on an $n \times n$ grid. PackIt! can be easily played on paper, either as a competitive two-player game or in \emph{solitaire} fashion. On the $t$-th turn, a…
In this paper we are going to solve an open problem about the game tetris. We are going to give the first results in the complexity of a variant of offline tetris introduced by Erik Demaine, Susan Hohenberger and David Liben Nowell in their…
Edge-matching problems, also called edge matching puzzles, are abstractions of placement problems with neighborhood conditions. Pieces with colored edges have to be placed on a board such that adjacent edges have the same color. The problem…
Single-elimination (SE) tournaments are a popular format used in competitive environments and decision making. Algorithms for SE tournament manipulation have been an active topic of research in recent years. In this paper, we initiate the…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
Bridge is a trick-taking card game requiring the ability to evaluate probabilities since it is a game of incomplete information where each player only sees its cards. In order to choose a strategy, a player needs to gather information about…
We analyze the computational complexity of several popular video games released for the Nintendo Game Boy video game console. We analyze the complexity of generalized versions of four popular Game Boy games: Donkey Kong, Wario Land, Harvest…
We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…
The twentieth century has seen the rise of a new type of video games targeted at a mass audience of "casual" gamers. Many of these games require the player to swap items in order to form matches of three and are collectively known as…
Given a fixed graph $H$ and a positive integer $n$, a Picker-Chooser $H$-game is a biased game played on the edge set of $K_n$ in which Picker is trying to force many copies of $H$ and Chooser is trying to prevent him from doing so. In this…
Tablut is a complete-knowledge, deterministic, and asymmetric board game, which has not been solved nor properly studied yet. In this work, its rules and characteristics are presented, then a study on its complexity is reported. An upper…
We study the computational complexity of the Buttons \& Scissors game and obtain sharp thresholds with respect to several parameters. Specifically we show that the game is NP-complete for $C = 2$ colors but polytime solvable for $C = 1$.…
Building on the results published in arxiv:2004.12849 we present a general framework for demonstrating the NP-hardness of satisfying many genres of loop and path puzzles using a 'T-metacell' gadget. We then use this to prove the…
We study a variation of the combinatorial game of 2-pile Nim. Move as in 2-pile Nim but with the following constraint: Suppose the previous player has just removed say $x>0$ tokens from the shorter pile (either pile in case they have the…
In this paper we introduce a new game; in this game there are two players who play as rival pirate gangs. The goal is to gather more treasure than your rival. The game is played on a graph and a player gathers treasure by moving to an…