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We consider an {\em enforce operator} on impartial rulesets similar to the Muller Twist and the comply/constrain operator of Smith and St\u anic\u a, 2002. Applied to the rulesets A and B, on each turn the opponent enforces one of the…

A finite impartial game is a two-player game in which the players take turns making moves and the game ends after finitely many moves. In this paper, we study a class of finite impartial games introduced by H.~Lenstra, which we call coin…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Masao Ishikawa , Toyokazu Ohmoto , Hiroyuki Tagawa , Yoshiki Takayama

Impartial subtraction games on the nonnegative integers have been studied by many and discussed in detail in for example the remarkable work Winning Ways by Conway, Berlekamp and Guy. We describe how comply variations of these games,…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2012-09-11 Urban Larsson

This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-17 Urban Larsson , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo

Combinatorial game theory (CGT), as introduced by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy, involves two players who move alternately in a perfect information, zero-sum game, and there are no chance devices. Also the games have the finite descent property…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2018-10-09 Melissa Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski , Paul Ottaway

We define a two-player combinatorial game in which players take alternate turns; each turn consists on deleting a vertex of a graph, together with all the edges containing such vertex. If any vertex became isolated by a player's move then…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-08-03 Richard Adams , Janae Dixon , Jennifer Elder , Jamie Peabody , Oscar Vega , Karen Willis

We begin by reviewing and proving the basic facts of combinatorial game theory. We then consider scoring games (also known as Milnor games or positional games), focusing on the "fixed-length" games for which all sequences of play terminate…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2011-07-27 Will Johnson

Combinatorial Game Theory has also been called `additive game theory', whenever the analysis involves sums of independent game components. Such {\em disjunctive sums} invoke comparison between games, which allows abstract values to be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-29 Urban Larsson , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

We introduce and analyze the ordered Zeckendorf game, a novel combinatorial two-player game inspired by Zeckendorf's Theorem, which guarantees a unique decomposition of every positive integer as a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers.…

Number Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Ivan Bortnovskyi , Michael Lucas , Steven J. Miller , Iana Vranesko , Ren Watson , Cameron White

Scoring play games were first studied by Fraser Stewart for his PhD thesis. He showed that under the disjunctive sum, scoring play games are partially ordered, but do not have the same "nice" structure of normal play games. In this paper I…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-02-22 Fraser Stewart

In 1901, Bouton proved that a winning strategy of the game of Nim is given by the bitwise XOR, called the nim-sum. But, why does such a weird binary operation work? Led by this question, this paper introduces a categorical reinterpretation…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Ryuya Hora

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-31 Pat Devlin , Paulina Trifonova

A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-06-05 Elizabeth Kupin

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. One of the major approaches to analyzing games in combinatorial game theory is to break down a given game position into a disjunctive sum of multiple…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-11-14 Kengo Hashimoto

The class of Guaranteed Scoring Games (GS) are two-player combinatorial games with the property that Normal-play games (Conway et. al.) are ordered embedded into GS. They include, as subclasses, the scoring games considered by Milnor…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-06-01 Urban Larsson , João P. Neto , Richard J. Nowakowski , Carlos P. Santos

Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-02-11 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski

We introduce and analyse an extension of the disjunctive sum operation on some classical impartial games. Whereas the disjunctive sum describes positions formed from independent subpositions, our operation combines positions that are not…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-02-24 Graham Farr , Nhan Bao Ho

We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Antoine Dailly , Eric Duchene , Urban Larsson , Gabrielle Paris

Repeated games have a long tradition in the behavioral sciences and evolutionary biology. Recently, strategies were discovered that permit an unprecedented level of control over repeated interactions by enabling a player to unilaterally…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2016-10-25 Alex McAvoy , Christoph Hauert

Subtraction games have a rich literature as normal-play combinatorial games (e.g., Berlekamp, Conway, and Guy, 1982). Recently, the theory has been extended to zero-sum scoring play (Cohensius et al. 2019). Here, we take the approach of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-01-22 Anjali Bhagat , Tanmay Kulkarni , Urban Larsson , Divya Murali
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