Related papers: A Practical Method for Preventing Forced Wins in U…
We show that there is an $m=2n+o(n)$, such that, in the Maker-Breaker game played on $\Z^d$ where Maker needs to put at least $m$ of his marks consecutively in one of $n$ given winning directions, Breaker can force a draw using a pairing…
Consider a $n \times n$ tic-tac-toe board. In each field of the board, draw a smaller $n\times n$ tic-tac-toe board. Now let super tic-tac-toe (STTT) be a game where each player's move dictates which field on the larger board a player must…
Tic-Tac-Toe game can be played by two players where the square block (3 x 3) can be filled with a cross (X) or a circle (O). The game will toggle between the players by giving the chance for each player to mark their move. When one of the…
Positional games are a well-studied class of combinatorial game. In their usual form, two players take turns to play moves in a set (`the board'), and certain subsets are designated as `winning': the first person to occupy such a set wins…
A popular challenge on the social media app TikTok is to place the output of a random number generator in ascending order without arriving at a contradiction. Most players rely on intuition to construct their sequences and debate has…
We introduce and study pawn games, a class of two-player zero-sum turn-based graph games. A turn-based graph game proceeds by placing a token on an initial vertex, and whoever controls the vertex on which the token is located, chooses its…
Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…
In numerous positional games the identity of the winner is easily determined. In this case one of the more interesting questions is not {\em who} wins but rather {\em how fast} can one win. These type of problems were studied earlier for…
We introduce a natural variant of weighted voting games, which we refer to as k-Prize Weighted Voting Games. Such games consist of n players with weights, and k prizes, of possibly differing values. The players form coalitions, and the i-th…
The game of Hex has two players who take turns placing stones of their respective colors on the hexagons of a rhombus-shaped hexagonal grid. Black wins by completing a crossing between two opposite edges, while White wins by completing a…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
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…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
We consider a two-player search game on a tree $T$. One vertex (unknown to the players) is randomly selected as the target. The players alternately guess vertices. If a guess $v$ is not the target, then both players are informed in which…
We consider random-turn positional games, introduced by Peres, Schramm, Sheffield and Wilson in 2007. A $p$-random-turn positional game is a two-player game, played the same as an ordinary positional game, except that instead of alternating…
Reachability games are two-player games played on a graph, where the objective of $\texttt{REACH}$ player is to reach the target set whereas the objective of $\texttt{SAFE}$ player is to stay away from the target set. Reachability games…
In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…
Winning the coin toss at the end of a tied soccer game gives a team the right to choose whether to kick either first or second on all five rounds of penalty kicks, when each team is allowed one kick per round. There is considerable evidence…
In this note, we investigate combinatorial games where both players move randomly (each turn, independently selecting a legal move uniformly at random). In this model, we provide closed-form expressions for the expected number of turns in a…
We study (a:a) Maker-Breaker games played on the edge set of the complete graph on n vertices. In the following four games - perfect matching game, Hamilton cycle game, star factor game and path factor game, our goal is to determine the…