Related papers: Computational Properties of Slime Trail

Node Kayles is a well-known two-player impartial game on graphs: Given an undirected graph, each player alternately chooses a vertex not adjacent to previously chosen vertices, and a player who cannot choose a new vertex loses the game. The…

In this paper, we will be proving mathematically that scoring play combinatorial game theory covers all combinatorial games. That is, there is a sub-set of scoring play games that are identical to the set of normal play games, and a…

We study the computational complexity of distance games, a class of combinatorial games played on graphs. A move consists of colouring an uncoloured vertex subject to it not being at certain distances determined by two sets, D and S. D is…

Tumbleweed is a popular two-player perfect-information new territorial game played at the prestigious Mind Sport Olympiad. We define a generalized version of the game, where the board size is arbitrary and so is the possible number of…

We show that Mis\`ere Partizan Arc Kayles is PSPACE-complete on planar graphs via a reduction from Bounded Two-Player Constraint Logic. Furthermore, we show how to embed our gadgets onto the square and triangular grids. In order to clearly…

Given a graph $G$, a set $S$ of vertices in $G$ is a general position set if no triple of vertices from $S$ lie on a common shortest path in $G$. The general position achievement/avoidance game is played on a graph $G$ by players A and B…

The Game of Cycles, introduced by Su (2020), is played on a simple connected planar graph together with its bounded cells, and players take turns marking edges with arrows according to a sink-source rule that gives the game a topological…

Generalized Geography is a combinatorial game played on a directed graph. Players take turns moving a token from vertex to vertex, deleting a vertex after moving the token away from it. A player unable to move loses. It is well known that…

In this paper, we introduce a two-player impartial game on graphs, called a {\em feedback game}, which is a variant of the generalized geography. We study the feedback game on Eulerian graphs. In particular, we show that the…

Graph Pebbling is a well-studied single-player game on graphs. We introduce the game of Blocking Pebbles which adapts Graph Pebbling into a two-player strategy game in order to examine it within the context of Combinatorial Game Theory.…

Maker-Breaker total domination game in graphs is introduced as a natural counterpart to the Maker-Breaker domination game recently studied by Duch\^ene, Gledel, Parreau, and Renault. Both games are instances of the combinatorial…

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.…

In this paper, we analyse a misere tree searching game, where players take turns to guess vertices in a tree with a secret `poisoned' vertex. After each turn, the guessed vertex is removed from the tree and the game continues on the…

In 2010, Bre\v{s}ar, Klav\v{z}ar and Rall introduced the optimization variant of the graph domination game and the game domination number, which was proved PSPACE-hard by Bre\v{s}ar et al. in 2016. In 2024, Leo Versteegen obtained the…

We study the complexity of solving two-player infinite duration games played on a fixed finite graph, where the control of a node is not predetermined but rather assigned randomly. In classic random-turn games, control of each node is…

We introduce a new abstract graph game, Swap Planarity, where the goal is to reach a state without edge intersections and a move consists of swapping the locations of two vertices connected by an edge. We analyze this puzzle game using…

Without further ado, we present the P_3-game. The P_3-game is decidable for elementary classes of graphs such as paths and cycles. From an algorithmic point of view, the connected P_3-game is fascinating. We show that the connected P_3-game…

The preference graph is a combinatorial representation of the structure of a normal-form game. Its nodes are the strategy profiles, with an arc between profiles if they differ in the strategy of a single player, where the orientation…

The guarding game is a game in which several cops try to guard a region in a (directed or undirected) graph against Robber. Robber and the cops are placed on the vertices of the graph; they take turns in moving to adjacent vertices (or…

Let $(X, \mathcal{F})$ be a hypergraph. The Maker-Breaker game on $(X, \mathcal{F})$ is a combinatorial game between two players, Maker and Breaker. Beginning with Maker, the players take turns claiming vertices from $X$ that have not yet…