Related papers: Dots-and-Polygons
In the "Game about Squares" the task is to push unit squares on an integer lattice onto corresponding dots. A square can only be moved into one given direction. When a square is pushed onto a lattice point with an arrow the direction of the…
Domineering is a combinatorial game played on a subset of a rectangular grid between two players. Each board position can be put into one of four outcome classes based on who the winner will be if both players play optimally. In this note,…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
The classical Maker-Breaker positional game is played on a board which is a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$, with two players, Maker and Breaker, alternately claiming vertices of $\mathcal{H}$ until all the vertices are claimed. When the game…
We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…
We study operators that combine combinatorial games. This field was initiated by Sprague-Grundy (1930s), Milnor (1950s) and Berlekamp-Conway-Guy (1970-80s) via the now classical disjunctive sum operator on (abstract) games. The new class…
Positional games are a mathematical class of two-player games comprising Tic-tac-toe and its generalizations. We propose a novel encoding of these games into Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs) such that a game instance admits a winning…
In a delightful article that recently appeared in Mathematics Magazine, David and Lori Mccune analyze the board game "Count Your Chickens!", recommended to children three and up. Alas, they use the advanced theory of Markov chains, that…
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),…
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
The numbers game is a one-player game played on a finite simple graph with certain "amplitudes" assigned to its edges and with an initial assignment of real numbers to its nodes. The moves of the game successively transform the numbers at…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
The following general variant of deterministic Hats game is analyzed. Several sages wearing colored hats occupy the vertices of a graph, the $k$-th sage can have hats of one of $h(k)$ colors. Each sage tries to guess the color of his own…
In repeated games, players choose actions concurrently at each step. We consider a parameterized setting of repeated games in which the players form a population of an arbitrary size. Their utility functions encode a reachability objective.…
A box-ball system is a discrete dynamical system whose dynamics come from the balls jumping according to certain rules. A permutation on n objects gives a box-ball system state by assigning its one-line notation to n consecutive boxes.…
The subject of this paper is a variation of a blackjack game, mainly popular in some parts of Europe where it is known as einz (in German slang: one). We describe the rules of this game, indicate its main characteristics, give some…
Parity games are games that are played on directed graphs whose vertices are labeled by natural numbers, called priorities. The players push a token along the edges of the digraph. The winner is determined by the parity of the greatest…
Poker is a family of card games that includes many variations. We hypothesize that most poker games can be solved as a pattern matching problem, and propose creating a strong poker playing system based on a unified poker representation. Our…
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…
Pebble games were extensively studied in the 1970s and 1980s in a number of different contexts. The last decade has seen a revival of interest in pebble games coming from the field of proof complexity. Pebbling has proven to be a useful…