Related papers: Board games, random boards and long boards
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…
The Number Rotation Puzzle (NRP) is a combination puzzle in which the goal is to rearrange a scrambled rectangular grid of numbers back into order via moves that consist of rotating square blocks of numbers of fixed size. Over all possible…
Several articles deal with tilings with squares and dominoes on 2-dimensional boards, but only a few on boards in 3-dimensional space. We examine a tiling problem with colored cubes and bricks of $(2\times2\times n)$-board in three…
We propose a new kind of sliding-block puzzle, called Gourds, where the objective is to rearrange 1 x 2 pieces on a hexagonal grid board of 2n + 1 cells with n pieces, using sliding, turning and pivoting moves. This puzzle has a single…
We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…
Abalone is a 2-player board game with perfect information. The game is played on a 5x5x5 hexagonal grid and ends when a player pushes 6 of their opponents' pieces off the board. Abalone is similar to games like chess and Go in that all…
At some places (see the references) Martin Erickson describes a certain game: "Two players alternately write O's (first player) and X's (second player) in the unoccupied cells of an n x n grid. The first player (if any) to occupy four cells…
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…
In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…
We study the generalization of the game Lights Out in which the standard square grid board is replaced by a graph. We examine the probability that, when a graph is chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices and $e$…
Here, we present a variant of the sliding coins game. Two coins are placed on distinct squares of a semi-infinite linear board with squares numbered $0, 1, 2, dots, $. Two players take turns and move a coin to a lower unoccupied square.…
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 prove the computational intractability of rotating and placing $n$ square tiles into a $1 \times n$ array such that adjacent tiles are compatible--either equal edge colors, as in edge-matching puzzles, or matching tab/pocket shapes, as…
The 15 puzzle is a classic reconfiguration puzzle with fifteen uniquely labeled unit squares within a $4 \times 4$ board in which the goal is to slide the squares (without ever overlapping) into a target configuration. By generalizing the…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…
The Gale-Berlekamp switching game is played on the following device: $G_n=\{1,2,\ldots,n\} \times \{1,2,\ldots,n\}$ is an $n \times n$ array of lights is controlled by $2n$ switches, one for each row or column. Given an (arbitrary) initial…
2048 is a stochastic single-player game involving 16 cells on a 4 by 4 grid, where a player chooses a direction among up, down, left, and right to obtain a score by merging two tiles with the same number located in neighboring cells along…
We construct irreducible balanced non-transitive sets of $n$-sided dice for any positive integer $n$, which was raised in \cite[Question 5.2]{SS17}. One main tool of the construction is to study so-called fair sets of dice. Furthermore, we…
A famous (and hard) chess problem asks what is the maximum number of safe squares possible in placing $n$ queens on an $n\times n$ board. We examine related problems from placing $n$ rooks. We prove that as $n\to\infty$, the probability…
Spiro, Surya and Zeng (Electron. J. Combin. 2023; arXiv:2207.11272) recently studied a semi-restricted variant of the well-known game Rock, Paper, Scissors; in this variant the game is played for $3n$ rounds, but one of the two players is…