Related papers: Board games, random boards and long boards

Infinite chess is chess played on an infinite edgeless chessboard. The familiar chess pieces move about according to their usual chess rules, and each player strives to place the opposing king into checkmate. The mate-in-n problem of…

We study the complexity of the popular one player combinatorial game known as Flood-It. In this game the player is given an n by n board of tiles where each tile is allocated one of c colours. The goal is to make the colours of all tiles…

The main goal of this paper is to address the following problem: given a positive integer $n$, find the largest value $S(n)$ such that a square of edge length $S(n)$ in the Euclidean plane can be covered by $n$ unit squares. We investigate…

Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…

Many natural processes rely on optimizing the success ratio of a search process. We use an experimental setup consisting of a simple online game in which players have to find a target hidden on a board, to investigate the how the rounds are…

Using mostly elementary considerations, we find out who wins the game of Domineering on all rectangular boards of width 2, 3, 5, and 7. We obtain bounds on other boards as well, and prove the existence of polynomial-time strategies for…

We consider an online version of a longest path problem in an undirected and planar graph that is motivated by a location and routing problem occurring in the board game "Turn & Taxis". Path extensions have to be selected based on only…

The Game of Poker Chips, Dominoes and Survival fosters team building and high level cooperation in large groups, and is a tool applied in management training exercises. Each player, initially given two colored poker chips, is allowed to…

This paper explores the entertainment experience and learning experience in Scrabble. It proposes a new measure from the educational point of view, which we call learning coefficient, based on the balance between the learner's skill and the…

The class of passable games was recently introduced by Selinger as a class of combinatorial games that are suitable for modelling monotone set coloring games such as Hex. In a monotone set coloring game, the players alternately color the…

A fundamental component of networking infras- tructure is the policy, used in routing tables and firewalls. Accordingly, there has been extensive study of policies. However, the theory of such policies indicates that the size of the…

Consider a configuration of pebbles distributed on the vertices of a connected graph of order $n$. A pebbling step consists of removing two pebbles from a given vertex and placing one pebble on an adjacent vertex. A distribution of pebbles…

The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…

Determining how close a winner of an election is to becoming a loser, or distinguishing between different possible winners of an election, are major problems in computational social choice. We tackle these problems for so-called weighted…

We consider a randomized algorithm for the unique games problem, using independent multinomial probabilities to assign labels to the vertices of a graph. The expected value of the solution obtained by the algorithm is expressed as a…

In this work, we study a triangular variant of the Lights Out game, proposed in the 2025 Capixaba Mathematics Olympiad. We present a combinatorial description of the game, formally characterize its operations, and introduce the notion of a…

We investigate the expected number of calls required to achieve Bingo in a generalized (n,m)-Bingo game, where each n x n card is filled by sampling n numbers from m possible values per column. Using the inclusion-exclusion principle, we…

Quantitative measures of randomness in games are useful for game design and have implications for gambling law. We treat the outcome of a game as a random variable and derive a closed-form expression and estimator for the variance in the…

We theoretically analyze the popular mobile app game `2048' for the first time in $n$-dimensional space. We show that one can reach the maximum value $2^{n_1n_2+1}$ and $2^{\left({\prod_{i=1}^{d} n_i}\right)+1}$ for the two dimensional…

Here is a square problem: in a unit square, is there a point with four rational distances to the vertices? A probability argument suggests a negative answer. This paper proves several special cases of the square problem: if the point sits…