Related papers: Progress towards the 1/2-Conjecture for the domina…
We introduce a new positional game called `Toucher-Isolator', which is a quantitative version of a Maker-Breaker type game. The playing board is the set of edges of a given graph G, and the two players, Toucher and Isolator, claim edges…
The guarding game is a game in which several cops try to guard a region in a (directed or undirected) graph against Robber. Robber and the cops are placed on the vertices of the graph; they take turns in moving to adjacent vertices (or…
We study the Maker-Breaker tournament game played on the edge set of a given graph $G$. Two players, Maker and Breaker claim unclaimed edges of $G$ in turns, and Maker wins if by the end of the game she claims all the edges of a pre-defined…
The Domination game is an impartial game on graphs, introduced in 2010, and proved PSPACE-complete in the normal variant in 2026. In this game, Alice and Bob alternately select playable vertices, where a vertex is playable if it dominates…
Let $\gamma(G)$ and $i(G)$ be the domination number and the independent domination number of $G$, respectively. Rad and Volkmann posted a conjecture that $i(G)/ \gamma(G) \leq \Delta(G)/2$ for any graph $G$, where $\Delta(G)$ is its maximum…
The study of combinatorial games is intimately tied to the study of graphs, as any game can be realized as a directed graph in which players take turns traversing the edges until reaching a sink. However, there have heretofore been few…
Let $G$ be a graph with no isolated vertex. In this paper, we study a parameter that is a relaxation of arguably the most important domination parameter, namely the total domination number, $\gamma_t(G)$. A set $S$ of vertices in $G$ is a…
In a graph, a watchman's walk is a minimum closed dominating walk. Given a graph $G$ and a single watchman, the length of a watchman's walk in $G$ (the watchman number) is denoted by $w(G)$ and the typical goals of the watchman's walk…
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…
A gambler moves between the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. Multiple cops pursue the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. We investigate the…
Two players play a game by alternately splitting a surface of a compact $2$-manifold along a simple closed curve that is not null-homotopic and attaching disks to the resulting boundary; the last player who can move wins. Starting from an…
In a graph $G$, a vertex dominates itself and its neighbors. A subset $S$ of vertices of $G$ is a double dominating set of $G$ if every vertex is dominated by at least two vertices in $S$. The double domination number $\gamma_{\times 2}(G)$…
A 3-tournament is a complete 3-uniform hypergraph where each edge has a special vertex designated as its tail. A vertex set $X$ dominates $T$ if every vertex not in $X$ is contained in an edge whose tail is in $X$. The domination number of…
We consider games played on finite graphs, whose goal is to obtain a trace belonging to a given set of winning traces. We focus on those states from which Player 1 cannot force a win. We explore and compare several criteria for establishing…
This paper studies the idea of ``deception by motion'' through a two-player dynamic game played between a Mover who must retrieve resources at a goal location, and an Eater who can consume resources at two candidate goals. The Mover seeks…
A dominating set of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a vertex set $D$ such that every vertex in $V(G) \setminus D$ is adjacent to a vertex in $D$. The cardinality of a smallest dominating set of $D$ is called the domination number of $G$ and is denoted…
Given a configuration of pebbles on the vertices of a connected graph G, a pebbling move is defined as the removal of two pebbles from some vertex, and the placement of one of these on an adjacent vertex. We introduce the notion of…
A Subtraction-Division game is a two player combinatorial game with three parameters: a set S, a set D, and a number n. The game starts at n, and is a race to say the number 1. Each player, on their turn, can either move the total to n-s…
Graph pebbling is a game played on a connected graph G. A player purchases pebbles at a dollar a piece, and hands them to an adversary who distributes them among the vertices of G (called a configuration) and chooses a target vertex r. The…
Given a graph G, the domination number gamma(G) of G is the minimum order of a set S of vertices such that each vertex not in S is adjacent to some vertex in S. Equivalently, label the vertices from {0, 1} so that the sum over each closed…