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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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Lear Bahack

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-03-11 Jonathan Weed

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Naoki Matsumoto , Atsuki Nagao

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-02-04 Valentin Gledel , Michael A. Henning , Vesna Iršič , Sandi Klavžar

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Chao Yang , Zhujun Zhang

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Arefin Huq

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…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Kevin Buchin , Mart Hagedoorn , Irina Kostitsyna , Max van Mulken , Jolan Rensen , Leo van Schooten

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Florian Galliot , Jonas Sénizergues

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Valentin Gledel , Nacim Oijid , Sébastien Tavenas , Stéphan Thomassé

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-09-08 Sayar Karmakar , Moumanti Podder , Souvik Roy , Soumyarup Sadhukhan

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Kyle Burke , Silvia Heubach , Melissa Huggan , Svenja Huntemann

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nathan Fox , Carson Geissler

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2014-08-28 Rahul Mehta

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,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Jeffrey Bosboom , Erik D. Demaine , Mikhail Rudoy

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Pete Austin , Nicolas Mazzocchi , Sougata Bose , Patrick Totzke

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.…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Kyle Burke , Matthew Ferland , Shanghua Teng

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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2007-08-31 Matthew Delacorte

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