Related papers: Phutball Draws
This paper concerns two-player alternating play combinatorial games (Conway 1976) in the normal-play convention, i.e. last move wins. Specifically, we study impartial vector subtraction games on tuples of nonnegative integers (Golomb 1966),…
A positional game is a game where two players sequentially label vertices of a hypergraph, consisting of a board and a collection of winning sets, with colors assigned to each player until all vertices of the board are claimed. The first…
We develop a new approach that computes approximate equilibrium strategies in Jotto, a popular word game. Jotto is an extremely large two-player game of imperfect information; its game tree has many orders of magnitude more states than…
Game boards are described in the Ludii general game system by their underlying graphs, based on tiling, shape and graph operators, with the automatic detection of important properties such as topological relationships between graph…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
Wythoff's Game is a variation of Nim in which players may take an equal number of stones from each pile or make valid Nim moves. W. A. Wythoff proved that the set of P-Positions (losing position), $C$, for Wythoff's Game is given by $C :=…
Consider a card guessing game with complete feedback in which a deck of $n$ cards ordered $1,\dots, n$ is riffle-shuffled once. With the goal to maximize the number of correct guesses, a player guesses cards from the top of the deck one at…
We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…
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…
Connect Four is a two-player game where each player attempts to be the first to create a sequence of four of their pieces, arranged horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, by dropping pieces into the columns of a grid of width seven and…
Consider a periodical (in two independent directions) tiling of the plane with polygons (faces). In this article we shall only give examples using squares, regular hexagons, equilateral triangles and parallelograms ("unions" of two…
Epiphainein counts unreachable single-side pawn diagrams (in chess) where pawns can move forward or diagonally-forward without limit whilst remaining on the board. Epiphainein is a serial calculation and takes a few seconds to calculate the…
Players are arranged on a regular lattice and coded with a specific strategy for a pre-defined game. Each player sums their payoffs from playing the game with each of their neighbors, and then adopts the strategy of the most successful…
Markov chains are an important example for a course on stochastic processes because simple board games can be used to illustrate the fundamental concepts. For example, a looping board game (like Monopoly) consists of all recurrent states,…
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
This paper presents a general approach for measuring distances between board games within the Ludii general game system. These distances are calculated using a previously published set of general board game concepts, each of which…
We give a simple human-playable winning strategy for the second player in the game of Sim.
Consider a stream of $n$ random points (say, from the unit square) arriving one by one, where a player has to make an irreversible immediate decision for each arriving point whether to pick it. The player has to pick a single point, and the…
In this paper we give a mathematical model for a game that we call picture cube puzzle and investigate its properties. The central question is the number of moves required to solve the puzzle. A mathematical discussion is followed by the…
We introduce a 2-player game played on an infinite grid, initially empty, where each player in turn chooses a vertex and colours it. The first player aims to create some pattern from a target set, while the second player aims to prevent it.…