Related papers: Eternal Picaria
Quixo is a two-player game played on a 5$\times$5 grid where the players try to align five identical symbols. Specifics of the game require the usage of novel techniques. Using a combination of value iteration and backward induction, we…
Rock is wrapped by paper, paper is cut by scissors, and scissors are crushed by rock. This simple game is popular among children and adults to decide on trivial disputes that have no obvious winner, but cyclic dominance is also at the heart…
Consider the following probabilistic one-player game: The board is a graph with $n$ vertices, which initially contains no edges. In each step, a new edge is drawn uniformly at random from all non-edges and is presented to the player,…
Given two players alternately picking pieces of a pizza sliced by radial cuts, in such a way that after the first piece is taken every subsequent chosen piece is adjacent to some previously taken piece, we provide a strategy for the…
Briscola is a traditional Italian trick-taking card game whose simplest form is played by two players. Popular folklore credits victory almost entirely to the player who is dealt more cards of the trump suit (the so-called \emph{briscola}),…
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…
The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…
Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…
We consider a game in which players are the vertices of a directed graph. Initially, Nature chooses one player according to some fixed distribution and gives her a buck, which represents the request to perform a chore. After completing the…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
This brief paper describes the single-player card game called "Perpetual Motion" and reports on a computational analysis of the game's outcome. The analysis follows a Monte Carlo methodology based on a sample of 10,000 randomly generated…
We introduce a new combinatorial game, named Triangle Game. In this game, a directed $3$-cycle graph is given, and tokens are placed on each vertex. The player chooses an edge and takes at least one token from the initial vertex. At 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…
"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…
The study of the combinatorial game Nim and its variants is rich and varied, but little is known of the game Nim with a Pass. It is Nim, but once per game a player is permitted to skip their turn but this can only be done if a nonempty pile…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
Zeckendorf proved that every natural number $n$ can be expressed uniquely as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers, called its Zeckendorf decomposition. Baird-Smith, Epstein, Flint, and Miller created the Zeckendorf game, a two-player…
Consider a rooted Galton-Watson tree $T$, to each of whose edges we assign, independently, a weight that equals $+1$ with probability $p_{1}$, $0$ with probability $p_{0}$ and $-1$ with probability $p_{-1}=1-p_{1}-p_{0}$. We play a game on…