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Circular Nim is a two-player impartial combinatorial game consisting of $n$ stacks of tokens placed in a circle. A move consists of choosing $k$ consecutive stacks and taking at least one token from one or more of the stacks. The last…
In chomp on graphs, two players alternatingly pick an edge or a vertex from a graph. The player that cannot move any more loses. The questions one wants to answer for a given graph are: Which player has a winning strategy? Can a explicit…
We study impartial take away games on 2 unordered piles of finite nonnegative numbers of tokens $(x,y)$. Two players alternate in removing at least one and at most all tokens from the respective piles, according to certain rules, and the…
This paper considers a natural ruleset for playing a partisan combinatorial game on a directed graph, which we call Digraph Placement. Given a digraph $G$ with a not necessarily proper $2$-coloring of $V(G)$, the Digraph Placement game…
In 1901, Bouton proved that a winning strategy of the game of Nim is given by the bitwise XOR, called the nim-sum. But, why does such a weird binary operation work? Led by this question, this paper introduces a categorical reinterpretation…
A poset game is a two-player game played over a partially ordered set (poset) in which the players alternate choosing an element of the poset, removing it and all elements greater than it. The first player unable to select an element of the…
Given two well partial orders $(P;\leq_P)$ and $(T;\leq_T)$, each with a minimum element, we study the following question: which player has a winning strategy for Chomp on the poset $(P\times T;\leq_{P\times T})$? Here, $(P\times…
Two-player complete-information game trees are perhaps the simplest possible setting for studying general-sum games and the computational problem of finding equilibria. These games admit a simple bottom-up algorithm for finding subgame…
We introduce CUT, the class of 2-player partition games. These are NIM type games, played on a finite number of heaps of beans. The rules are given by a set of positive integers, which specifies the number of allowed splits a player can…
This paper introduces a variant of the impartial combinatorial game nim, called tree nim, as well as a particular case of tree nim called tripod nim. A certain existence-uniqueness result and a periodicity result are proven about the…
The game of nim, with its simple rules, its elegant solution and its historical importance is the quintessence of a combinatorial game, which is why it led to so many generalizations and modifications. We present a modification with a new…
Several variations of hat guessing games have been popularly discussed in recreational mathematics. In a typical hat guessing game, after initially coordinating a strategy, each of $n$ players is assigned a hat from a given color set.…
We develop an algorithm for efficiently computing recursively defined functions on posets. We illustrate this algorithm by disproving conjectures about the game Subset Takeaway (Chomp on a hypercube) and computing the number of linear…
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 chip-firing games on multigraphs whose underlying simple graphs are trees, paths, and stars, denoted as banana trees, paths, and stars respectively. We present a polynomial time algorithm to compute the divisorial gonality of…
Many popular puzzle and matching games have been analyzed through the lens of computational complexity. Prominent examples include Sudoku, Candy Crush, and Flood-It. A common theme among these widely played games is that their generalized…
Bachet's game is a variant of the game of Nim. There are $n$ objects in one pile. Two players take turns to remove any positive number of objects not exceeding some fixed number $m$. The player who takes the last object loses. We consider a…
We study a popular puzzle game known variously as Clickomania and Same Game. Basically, a rectangular grid of blocks is initially colored with some number of colors, and the player repeatedly removes a chosen connected monochromatic group…
In a variant of communication tasks, players cooperate in choosing their local strategies to compute a given task later, working separately. Utilizing quantum bits for communication and sharing entanglement between parties is a recognized…
This article concerns the resolution of impartial combinatorial games, and in particular games that can be split in sums of independent positions. We prove that in order to compute the outcome of a sum of independent positions, it is always…