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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…

Dull, weak and nested solitaire games are important classes of parity games, capturing, among others, alternation-free mu-calculus and ECTL* model checking problems. These classes can be solved in polynomial time using dedicated algorithms.…

In this expository article, we discuss the rank-derangement problem, which asks for the number of permutations of a deck of cards such that each card is replaced by a card of a different rank. This combinatorial problem arises in computing…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

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 $C = 1$.…

The class of algorithmically computable simple games (i) includes the class of games that have finite carriers and (ii) is included in the class of games that have finite winning coalitions. This paper characterizes computable games,…

We study the computational complexity of the popular board game backgammon. We show that deciding whether a player can win from a given board configuration is NP-Hard, PSPACE-Hard, and EXPTIME-Hard under different settings of known and…

The physics-based simulation game Angry Birds has been heavily researched by the AI community over the past five years, and has been the subject of a popular AI competition that is currently held annually as part of a leading AI conference.…

This paper proves that arrangement of music is NP-hard when subject to various constraints: avoiding musical dissonance, limiting how many notes can be played simultaneously, and limiting transition speed between chords. These results imply…

This paper introduces a novel algorithm for two-player deterministic games with perfect information, which we call PROBS (Predict Results of Beam Search). Unlike existing methods that predominantly rely on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for…

We provide several positive and negative complexity results for solving games with imperfect recall. Using a one-to-one correspondence between these games on one side and multivariate polynomials on the other side, we show that solving…

Fibonacci nim is a popular impartial combinatorial game, usually played with a single pile of stones. The game is appealing due to its surprising connections with the Fibonacci numbers and the Zeckendorf representation. In this article, we…

We study the complexity of computing equilibria in binary public goods games on undirected graphs. In such a game, players correspond to vertices in a graph and face a binary choice of performing an action, or not. Each player's decision…

We are going to show that some variants of a puzzle called Pull in which the boxes have handles (i.e. we can only pull the boxes in certain directions) are NP-hard

We establish the first hardness results for the problem of computing the value of one-round games played by a verifier and a team of provers who can share quantum entanglement. In particular, we show that it is NP-hard to approximate within…

Computer games are motivating and beneficial in learning different educational skills. Most people use their fingers, hands, and arms when using a computer game. However, for people with motor disabilities this task can be a barrier. We…

Implementing board games in code can be a time-consuming task. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven effective at generating code for domain-specific tasks with simple contextual information. We aim to investigate whether…

We prove that the single-player game clobber is solvable in linear time when played on a line or on a cycle. For this purpose, we show that this game is equivalent to an optimization problem on a set of words defined by seven classes of…

In this paper we provide a case study of the use of relatively sophisticated mathematics and algorithms to redefine and adapt a simple traditional game/puzzle to exploit the computational power of smart devices. The focus here is not so…

Evolomino is a pencil-and-paper logic puzzle published by the Japanese company Nikoli, renowned for culture-independent puzzles such as Sudoku, Kakuro, and Slitherlink. Its name reflects the core mechanic: the polyomino-like blocks drawn by…