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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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Josh Brunner , Lily Chung , Michael Coulombe , Erik D. Demaine , Timothy Gomez , Jayson Lynch

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…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Erik D. Demaine , Martin L. Demaine , Helena A. Verrill

For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-03-05 Ary Shaviv

Conway Checkers is a game played with a checker placed in each square of the lower half of an infinite checkerboard. Pieces move by jumping over an adjacent checker, removing the checker jumped over. Conway showed that it is not possible to…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-05 Glenn Bruda , Joseph Cooper , Kareem Jaber , Raul Marquez , Steven J. Miller

We propose a generalization of positional games, supplementing them with a restriction on the order in which the elements of the board are allowed to be claimed. We introduce poset positional games, which are positional games with an…

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),…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-01-17 Urban Larsson , Indrajit Saha , Makoto Yokoo

We introduce a one-person game that we call Padlock Solitaire which resembles the well-known clock solitaire card game. Analyzing variants of this game we obtain simple proofs of some classical results of combinatorics including ballot…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-09-01 Johan Wästlund

Our theme bases on the classical Hanoi Towers Problem. In this paper we will define a new problem, permitting some positions, that were not legal in the classical problem. Our goal is to find an optimal (shortest possible) sequence of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Sergey Benditkis , Illya Safro

Given a polygon $P$ in the plane that can be translated, rotated and enlarged arbitrarily inside a unit square, the goal is to find a set of lines such that at least one of them always hits $P$ and the number of lines is minimized. We prove…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Sepideh Aghamolaei

In this paper, we study a reversible process (more precisely, a groupoid/group action) resembling the classical 15-puzzle, where the legal moves are to ``move the unique hole inside a translate of a shape $S$''. Such a process can be…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Ville Salo , Juliette Schabanel

We introduce Shortest Connection Game, a two-player game played on a directed graph with edge costs. Given two designated vertices in which they start, the players take turns in choosing edges emanating from the vertex they are currently…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-11-26 Andreas Darmann , Ulrich Pferschy , Joachim Schauer

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-02-18 Robert Steele , Daniel B. Larremore

Temporal graphs are a popular modelling mechanism for dynamic complex systems that extend ordinary graphs with discrete time. Simply put, time progresses one unit per step and the availability of edges can change with time. We consider the…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Pete Austin , Sougata Bose , Patrick Totzke

Morpion Solitaire is a pencil-and-paper game for a single player. A move in this game consists of putting a cross at a lattice point and then drawing a line segment that passes through exactly five consecutive crosses. The objective is to…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Akitoshi Kawamura , Takuma Okamoto , Yuichi Tatsu , Yushi Uno , Masahide Yamato

In this paper we investigate a differential game in which countably many dynamical objects pursue a single one. All the players perform simple motions. The duration of the game is fixed. The controls of a group of pursuers are subject to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-10 Mehdi Salimi , Gafurjan Ibragimov , Stefan Siegmund , Somayeh Sharifi

Abalone is a 2-player board game with perfect information. The game is played on a 5x5x5 hexagonal grid and ends when a player pushes 6 of their opponents' pieces off the board. Abalone is similar to games like chess and Go in that all…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-08-08 Joseph Gutstadt , Kirsten Hogenson , John Koerner

"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…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-01-27 Jens Maßberg

We consider three variants of a partisan combinatorial game between two players, Left and Right, played on an undirected simple graph. Left is able to delete vertices (and incident edges) while Right is able to delete edges. This natural…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-01-06 Nathan Shank , Devon Vukovich

We analyze the computational complexity of optimally playing the two-player board game Push Fight, generalized to an arbitrary board and number of pieces. We prove that the game is PSPACE-hard to decide who will win from a given position,…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Jeffrey Bosboom , Erik D. Demaine , Mikhail Rudoy

Recently, a new way of avoiding crossings in straight-line drawings of non-planar graphs has been investigated. The idea of partial edge drawings (PED) is to drop the middle part of edges and rely on the remaining edge parts called stubs.…