Related papers: Strings-and-Coins and Nimstring are PSPACE-complet…
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…
In this paper, we show that the problem of determining whether one player can force a win in a multiplayer version of the children's card game War is PSPACE-hard. The same reduction shows that a related problem, asking whether a player can…
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…
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…
Burke and Teng introduced a two-player combinatorial game Atropos based on Sperner's lemma, and showed that deciding whether one has a winning strategy for Atropos is PSPACE-complete. In the original Atropos game, the players must color a…
Cat-and-mouse is a two-player game on a finite graph. Chandra and Stockmeyer showed cat-and-mouse is P-complete on directed graphs. We show cat-and-mouse is P-complete on undirected graphs. To our knowledge, no proof of the directed case…
We present a new game, Dots & Polygons, played on a planar point set. Players take turns connecting two points, and when a player closes a (simple) polygon, the player scores its area. We show that deciding whether the game can be won from…
We introduce achievement positional games, a convention for positional games which encompasses the Maker-Maker and Maker-Breaker conventions. We consider two hypergraphs, one red and one blue, on the same vertex set. Two players, Left and…
Positional games were introduced by Hales and Jewett in 1963, and their study became more popular after Erdos and Selfridge's first result on their connection to Ramsey theory and hypergraph coloring in 1973. Several conventions of these…
This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…
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…
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…
We prove that a variant of 2048, a popular online puzzle game, is PSPACE-Complete. Our hardness result holds for a version of the problem where the player has oracle access to the computer player's moves. Specifically, we show that for an…
We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…
We analyze the computational complexity of several new variants of edge-matching puzzles. First we analyze inequality (instead of equality) constraints between adjacent tiles, proving the problem NP-complete for strict inequalities but…
Temporal graphs extend ordinary graphs with discrete time that affects the availability of edges. We consider solving games played on temporal graphs where one player aims to explore the graph, i.e., visit all vertices. The complexity…
We settle two long-standing complexity-theoretical questions-open since 1981 and 1993-in combinatorial game theory (CGT). We prove that the Grundy value (a.k.a. nim-value, or nimber) of Undirected Geography is PSPACE-complete to compute.…
Combining the the results of A.R. Meyer and L.J. Stockmeyer "The Equivalence Problem for Regular Expressions with Squaring Requires Exponential Space", and K.S. Booth "Isomorphism testing for graphs, semigroups, and finite automata are…
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…
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…