Related papers: Dreidel Lasts $O(N^2)$ Spins
Partizan subtraction games are combinatorial games where two players, say Left and Right, alternately remove a number n of tokens from a heap of tokens, with $n \in S_L$ (resp. $n \in S_R$) when it is Left's (resp. Right's) turn. The first…
$\textit{Magic: The Gathering}$ is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world $\textit{Magic}$ is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a…
N players are randomly fitted with a colored hat (q different colors). All players guess simultaneously the color of their own hat observing only the hat colors of the other N-1 players. The team wins if all players guess right. No…
Ladder tournaments are widely used to rank individuals in real-world organizations and games. Their mathematical properties however are still poorly understood. We formalize the ranking rule generated by a ladder tournament, and we show…
There is a common belief that humans and many animals follow transitive inference (choosing A over C on the basis of knowing that A is better than B and B is better than C). Transitivity seems to be the essence of rational choice. We…
We consider a two-player search game on a tree $T$. One vertex (unknown to the players) is randomly selected as the target. The players alternately guess vertices. If a guess $v$ is not the target, then both players are informed in which…
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…
The Thorp shuffle is defined as follows. Cut the deck into two equal piles. Drop the first card from the left pile or the right pile according to the outcome of a fair coin flip; then drop from the other pile. Continue this way until both…
Let A be a finite subset of $\nat$. Then NIM(A;n) is the following 2-player game: initially there are $n$ stones on the board and the players alternate removing $a\in A$ stones. The first player who cannot move loses. This game has been…
The present paper aims to extend the knight's tour problem for $k$-dimensional grids of the form $\{0,1\}^k$ to other fairy chess leapers. Accordingly, we constructively show the existence of closed tours in $2 \times 2 \times \cdots \times…
This work is concerned with the study of the Game of Graph Nim -- a class of two-player combinatorial games -- on graphs with $4$ edges. To each edge of such a graph is assigned a positive-integer-valued edge-weight, and during each round…
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…
We define and give results on the game NecklaceNim NN($n$,$k$) which is PathNim PN($n$,$k$) with an additional move allowed on the end vertices. This game arises as a sub-game in the context of solving CircularNim CN($n$,$k$) when $k-2$…
Children, sitting in a circle, each have a nonnegative number of candies in front of them. A whistle is blown and each child with more than one candy passes one candy to the left and one to the right. The sharing process is repeated until a…
Octal games are a well-defined family of two-player games played on heaps of counters, in which the players remove alternately a certain number of counters from a heap, sometimes being allowed to split a heap into two nonempty heaps, until…
In this paper we study the N-player nonzero-sum Dynkin game ($N\geq 3$) in continuous time, which is a non-cooperative game where the strategies are stopping times. We show that the game has a Nash equilibrium point for general payoff…
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…
The classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game of size 3 and its extension, Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock, are modeled by directed graphs called tournaments. They can be further extended to any odd size. The extended games are regular tournaments…
A deck of $n$ cards is shuffled by repeatedly moving the top card to one of the bottom $k_n$ positions uniformly at random. We give upper and lower bounds on the total variation mixing time for this shuffle as $k_n$ ranges from a constant…
Consider the following variant of Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS) played by two players Rei and Norman. The game consists of $3n$ rounds of RPS, with the twist being that Rei (the restricted player) must use each of Rock, Paper, and Scissors…