Related papers: Chess is hard even for a single player
Suppose that a train is running along a railway network, starting from a designated origin, with the goal of reaching a designated destination. The network, however, is of a special nature: every time the train traverses a switch, the…
Subset take-away is a two-player game involving a fixed finite set A. Players alternate choosing a proper, non-empty subset of A, with the condition that one may not name a set containing a set that was named earlier. A player unable to…
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…
We study a two-person game based on the well-studied brushing process on graphs. Players Min and Max alternately place brushes on the vertices of a graph. When a vertex accumulates at least as many brushes as its degree, it sends one brush…
We introduce a two player game on an n x n chessboard where queens are placed by alternating turns on a chessboard square whose availability is determined by the number of queens already on the board which can attack that square modulo two.…
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…
We study the following game version of the generalized graph Tur\'an problem. For two fixed graphs F and H, two players, Max and Mini, alternately claim unclaimed edges of the complete graph Kn such that the graph G of the claimed edges…
A placement of chess pieces on a chessboard is called dominating, if each free square of the chessboard is under attack by at least one piece. In this contribution we compute the number of dominating arrangements of $k$ rooks on an $n\times…
We study the algorithmic complexity of Maker-Breaker games played on the edge sets of general graphs. We mainly consider the perfect matching game and the $H$-game. Maker wins if she claims the edges of a perfect matching in the first, and…
The total domination game is a two-person competitive optimization game, where the players, Dominator and Staller, alternately select vertices of an isolate-free graph $G$. Each vertex chosen must strictly increase the number of vertices…
We introduce a new type of positional games, played on a vertex set of a graph. Given a graph $G$, two players claim vertices of $G$, where the outcome of the game is determined by the subgraphs of $G$ induced by the vertices claimed by…
A simple game $(N,v)$ is given by a set $N$ of $n$ players and a partition of $2^N$ into a set $\mathcal{L}$ of losing coalitions $L$ with value $v(L)=0$ that is closed under taking subsets and a set $\mathcal{W}$ of winning coalitions $W$…
We introduce Shortest Connection Game, a two-player game played on a directed graph with edge costs. Given two designated vertices in which they start, the players take turns in choosing edges emanating from the vertex they are currently…
We consider finite $n$-person deterministic graphical (DG) games. These games are modelled by finite directed graphs (digraphs) $G$ which may have directed cycles and, hence, infinite plays. Yet, it is assumed that all these plays are…
We propose a class of two person perfect information games based on weighted graphs. One of these games can be described in terms of a round pizza which is cut radially into pieces of varying size. The two players alternately take pieces…
This paper examines multiplayer symmetric constant-sum games with more than two players in a competitive setting, including examples like Mahjong, Poker, and various board and video games. In contrast to two-player zero-sum games,…
The UNIQUE GAMES problem is a central problem in algorithms and complexity theory. Given an instance of UNIQUE GAMES, the STRONG UNIQUE GAMES problem asks to find the largest subset of vertices, such that the UNIQUE GAMES instance induced…
In the $(s,d)$-spy game over a graph, introduced by Cohen et al. in 2016, one spy and $k$ guards occupy vertices of a graph and, at each turn, each guard may move along one edge and the spy may move along at most $s$ edges. The guards win…
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…
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…