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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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-08-28 Eric Duchêne , Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach , Urban Larsson

We introduce the notion of invariant vectors of a game and develop the Invariance Reduction Process, which first uses reduction of positions via invariance and then zero and merge reductions of games to arrive at smaller, solved sub-games…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-04-06 Balaji R. Kadam , Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach

We prove a recent conjecture of Duch\^ene and Rigo, stating that every complementary pair of homogeneous Beatty sequences represents the solution to an \emph{invariant} impartial game. Here invariance means that each available move in a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-05-25 Urban Larsson , Peter Hegarty , Aviezri S. Fraenkel

Inspired by the theory of poset games, we introduce a new compound of impartial combinatorial games and provide a complete analysis in the spirit of the Sprague-Grundy theory. Furthermore, we establish several substitution and reduction…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-05-19 Mišo Gavrilović , Alexander Thumm

In this paper we will be examining impartial scoring play games. We first give the basic definitions for what impartial scoring play games are and look at their general structure under the disjunctive sum. We will then examine the game of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-08-07 Fraser Stewart

Wythoff's Nim is a variant of 2-pile Nim in which players are allowed to take any positive number of stones from pile 1, or any positive number of stones from pile 2, or the same positive number from both piles. The player who makes the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-08-08 Mirabel Hu , Daniel Sleator , William Tsin

We examine short combinatorial games for three or more players under a new play convention in which a player who cannot move on their turn is the unique loser. We show that many theorems of impartial and partizan two-player games under…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-05 Mark Spindler

For normal play, impartial games, we define penults as those positions in which every option results in an immediate win for the other player. We explore the number of tokens in penults of two positional games, Impartial Tic and Impartial…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Boris Alexeev , Paul Ellis , Michael Richter , Thotsaporn Aek Thanatipanonda

We study an impartial game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately choose previously-unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who builds a generating set from the jointly-selected…

Group Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-12 Bret J. Benesh , Dana C. Ernst , Nandor Sieben

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-31 Pat Devlin , Paulina Trifonova

We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element without making…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-02-12 Bret J. Benesh , Dana C. Ernst , Nandor Sieben

We introduce the category of optiongraphs and option-preserving maps as a model to study impartial combinatorial games. Outcomes, remoteness, and extended nim-values are preserved under option-preserving maps. We show that the four…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-10-23 Mikhail Baltushkin , Dana C. Ernst , Nándor Sieben

The Grundy number of an impartial game G is the size of the unique Nim heap equal to G. We introduce a new variant of Nim, Restricted Nim, which restricts the number of stones a player may remove from a heap in terms of the size of the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Lionel Levine

Combinatorial games are played under two different play conventions: normal play, where the last player to move wins, and \mis play, where the last player to move loses. Combinatorial games are also classified into impartial positions and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-08-25 Meghan Rose Allen

Fibonacci nim is a popular impartial combinatorial game, usually played with a single pile of stones. The game is appealing due to its surprising connections with the Fibonacci numbers and the Zeckendorf representation. In this article, we…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-09-30 Urban Larsson , Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo

A circular Nim game 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 k stacks. The last…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2012-11-02 Matthieu Dufour , Silvia Heubach

We study 2-player impartial games of the form take-away which produce P-positions (second player winning positions) corresponding to complementary Beatty sequences, given by the continued fractions (1;k,1,k,1,...) and (k+1;k,1,k,1,...). Our…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-02-04 Urban Larsson , Mike Weimerskirch

Combinatorial games are two-player games of pure strategy where the players, usually called Left and Right, move alternately. In this paper, we introduce Cheating Robot games. These arise from simultaneous-play combinatorial games where one…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2022-02-11 Melissa A. Huggan , Richard J. Nowakowski

A subset of the vertex set of a graph is geodetically convex if it contains every vertex on any shortest path between two elements of the subset. The convex hull of a set of vertices is the smallest convex set containing the set. We study…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-05-14 Bret J. Benesh , Dana C. Ernst , Marie Meyer , Sarah K. Salmon , Nandor Sieben

We consider Subtraction Nim, where two players have exactly the same options, but which is partizan in the sense that at the game ending, a partizan rule is applied for the decision of the winner. We consider the following example: Let $S$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2026-05-29 Hiyu Inoue , Shin-nosuke Kadowaki , Shun-ichi Kimura , Haruki Wada