Related papers: Phutball Draws
We study Maker/Breaker games on the edges of sparse graphs. Maker and Breaker take turns in claiming previously unclaimed edges of a given graph H. Maker aims to occupy a given target graph G and Breaker tries to prevent Maker from…
This paper describes Wythoff's game with a pass, which is a variant of the classical Wythoff's game. The classical form is played with two piles of stones, from which two players take turns to remove stones from one or both piles. When…
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 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 analyze what happens to the average duration of a game of Chutes and Ladders as the probability of rolling $\delta \in \{ 1,2,3,4,5,6\}$ approaches 100%. We utilize Markov models, and Monte Carlo simulations in Python. We also introduce…
We study a variation of the combinatorial game of 2-pile Nim. Move as in 2-pile Nim but with the following constraint: Suppose the previous player has just removed say $x>0$ tokens from the shorter pile (either pile in case they have the…
Matrix games constitute a fundamental problem of game theory and describe a situation of two players with completely conflicting interests. We show how methods from statistical mechanics can be used to investigate the statistical properties…
We consider the following game that has been used as a way of testing claims of extrasensory perception (ESP). One is given a deck of $mn$ cards comprised of $n$ distinct types each of which appears exactly $m$ times: this deck is shuffled…
In this paper, we present a board game: Square War. The game definition of Square War is similar to the classic Chinese board game Go. Then we propose a mathematical problem of the game Square War. Finally, we show that the problem can be…
The paper studies one-shot two-player games with non-Bayesian uncertainty. The players have an attitude that ranges from optimism to pessimism in the face of uncertainty. Given the attitudes, each player forms a belief about the set of…
We study polygonal billiards with one-sided vertical mirror scattered on a square billiard table. We associate trajectories of these kinds of billiards with double rotations and study orbit behavior and questions of complexity.
In this paper we study a cooperative card game called Hanabi from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. In Hanabi, each card has one among $c$ colors and a number between $1$ and $n$. The aim is to make, for each color, a…
In the natural generalization of tic-tac-toe to an $n \times n \times n$ board where $n \in \mathbb{N}$, it is known that the first player has a winning strategy if $n \leq 4$ and that either player can force a draw if $n \geq 8$. The…
Online games are dynamic environments where players interact with each other, which offers a rich setting for understanding how players negotiate their way through the game to an ultimate victory. This work studies online player…
We initiate the study of the phantom version of Maker-Breaker positional games. In a phantom game, the moves of one of the players are hidden from the other player, who still has the complete information. We look at the biased $(a:b)$…
For any two squares A and B of an m x n checkerboard, we determine whether it is possible to move a checker through a route that starts at A, ends at B, and visits each square of the board exactly once. Each step of the route moves to an…
We study a game where one player selects a random function, and the other has to guess that function, and show that with high probability the second player can correctly guess most of the random function. We apply this analysis to…
We consider two-player games over graphs and give tight bounds on the memory size of strategies ensuring safety objectives. More specifically, we show that the minimal number of memory states of a strategy ensuring a safety objective is…
The number of quantifiers needed to express first-order properties is captured by two-player combinatorial games called multi-structural (MS) games. We play these games on linear orders and strings, and introduce a technique we call…
We carry out a game-theoretic analysis of the recursive game "Guts," a variant of poker featuring repeated play with possibly growing stakes. An interesting aspect of such games is the need to account for funds lost to all players if…