Related papers: Single-Player and Two-Player Buttons & Scissors Ga…

We consider the complexity of problems related to the combinatorial game Free-Flood-It, in which players aim to make a coloured graph monochromatic with the minimum possible number of flooding operations. Our main result is that computing…

In 1975 the first author proved that every finite tight two-person game form $g$ is Nash-solvable, that is, for every payoffs $u$ and $w$ of two players the obtained game $(g;u,w)$, in normal form, has a Nash equilibrium (NE) in pure…

We convert, within polynomial-time and sequential processing, NP-Complete Problems into a problem of deciding feasibility of a given system S of linear equations with constants and coefficients of binary-variables that are 0, 1, or -1. S is…

We extend the study of the 2-Solo Chess problem which was first introduced by Aravind, Misra, and Mittal in 2022. 2-Solo Chess is a single-player variant of chess in which the player must clear the board via captures such that only one…

Classic Rock-Paper-Scissors, RPS, has seen many variants and generalizations in the past several years. In the previous paper, we defined playability and balance for games. We used these definitions to show that different forms of imbalance…

Over the years, researchers have studied the complexity of several decision versions of Nash equilibrium in (symmetric) two-player games (bimatrix games). To the best of our knowledge, the last remaining open problem of this sort is the…

We establish that the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) threshold problem for mean-payoff games is NP-complete. While the SPE threshold problem was recently shown to be decidable (in doubly exponential time) and NP-hard, its exact worst…

"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…

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 prove that the classic falling-block video game Tetris (both survival and board clearing) remains NP-complete even when restricted to 8 columns, or to 4 rows, settling open problems posed over 15 years ago [BDH+04]. Our reduction is from…

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…

In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…

We give a simple proof of that determining solvability of Shisen-Sho boards is NP-complete. Furthermore, we show that under realistic assumptions, one can compute in logarithmic time if two tiles form a playable pair. We combine an…

This paper is about computing constrained approximate Nash equilibria in polymatrix games, which are succinctly represented many-player games defined by an interaction graph between the players. In a recent breakthrough, Rubinstein showed…

Motivated by the sequence form formulation of Koller et al. (GEB'96), this paper defines {\em bilinear games}, and proposes efficient algorithms for its rank based subclasses. Bilinear games are two-player non-cooperative single-shot games…

Many problems in compositional synthesis and verification of multi-agent systems -- such as rational verification and assume-guarantee verification in probabilistic systems -- reduce to reasoning about two-player multi-objective stochastic…

A binary constraint system game is a two-player one-round non-local game defined by a system of Boolean constraints. The game has a perfect quantum strategy if and only if the constraint system has a quantum satisfying assignment [R. Cleve…

Swish is a card game in which players are given cards having symbols (hoops and balls), and find a valid superposition of cards, called a "swish." Dailly, Lafourcade, and Marcadet (FUN 2024) studied a generalized version of Swish and showed…

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…

Many of the famous single-player games, commonly called puzzles, can be shown to be NP-Complete. Indeed, this class of complexity contains hundreds of puzzles, since people particularly appreciate completing an intractable puzzle, such as…