Related papers: Solitaire Clobber

We prove that the single-player game clobber is solvable in linear time when played on a line or on a cycle. For this purpose, we show that this game is equivalent to an optimization problem on a set of words defined by seven classes of…

Clobber is an alternate-turn two-player game introduced in 2001 by Albert, Grossman, Nowakowski and Wolfe. The board is a graph with each node colored black (x), white (o), or empty (-). Player Left has black stones, player Right has white…

We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire on a triangular board of arbitrary size. The basic game begins from a full board with one peg missing and finishes with one peg at a specified board location. We develop necessary and…

"Solitaire Chess" is a logic puzzle published by Thinkfun, that can be seen as a single person version of traditional chess. Given a chess board with some chess pieces of the same color placed on it, the task is to capture all pieces but…

In this paper we describe several player preferences in games with $N \geq 2$ players, in particular the case $N = 3$, and use them to simplify game trees, using the game of Clobber as our example. We show that, using a fixed starting…

We investigate the game of peg solitaire on different board shapes, and find those of diamond or rhombus shape have interesting properties. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. Rhombus boards of side 6 have…

Triangular peg solitaire is a well-known one-person game or puzzle. When one peg captures many pegs consecutively, this is called a sweep. We investigate whether the game can end in a dramatic fashion, with one peg sweeping all remaining…

We consider the one-person game of peg solitaire played on a computer. Two popular board shapes are the 33-hole cross-shaped board, and the 15-hole triangle board---we use them as examples throughout. The basic game begins from a full board…

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 this paper we study a single player game consisting of $n$ black checkers and $m$ white checkers, called shifting the checkers. We have proved that the minimum number of steps needed to play the game for general $n$ and $m$ is $nm + n +…

We introduce a generalization of "Solo Chess", a single-player variant of the game that can be played on chess.com. The standard version of the game is played on a regular 8 x 8 chessboard by a single player, with only white pieces, using…

Domineering is a two-player game played on a checkerboard in which one player places dominoes vertically, while the other places them horizontally. In this paper, we find out the minimum number of moves for a game of Domineering to end on…

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…

So Long Sucker is a strategy board game that requires 4 players, each with $c$ chips of their designated color, and a board made of $k$ empty piles. With a clear set-up comes intricate rules, such as: players taking turns but not in a fixed…

We introduce a two-player game in which one and his/her opponent attempt to pack as many ``prisoners'' as possible on the squares of an n-by-n checkerboard; each prisoner has to be ``protected'' by at least as many guards as the number of…

We solve the problem of one-dimensional Peg Solitaire. In particular, we show that the set of configurations that can be reduced to a single peg forms a regular language, and that a linear-time algorithm exists for reducing any…

We introduce a new family of one-player games, involving the movement of coins from one configuration to another. Moves are restricted so that a coin can be placed only in a position that is adjacent to at least two other coins. The goal of…

Peg solitaire is an old puzzle with a 300 year history. We consider two ways a computer can be utilized to find interesting peg solitaire puzzles. It is common for a peg solitaire puzzle to begin from a symmetric board position, we have…

We analyze Solo Chess puzzles, where the input is an $n \times n$ board containing some standard Chess pieces of the same color, and the goal is to make a sequence of capture moves to reduce down to a single piece. Prior work analyzes this…

We study the computational complexity of the Buttons \& Scissors game and obtain sharp thresholds with respect to several parameters. Specifically we show that the game is NP-complete for $C = 2$ colors but polytime solvable for $C = 1$.…