This book explores the underlying mathematical reasons for why games and puzzles are
challenging and so much fun. It shows how games and puzzles can serve as powerful …

Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and
complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an …

In this paper, we study three connection games among the most widely played: havannah,
twixt, and slither. We show that determining the outcome of an arbitrary input position is …

Determining the complexity of perfect information trick-taking card games is a long standing
open problem. This question is worth addressing not only because of the popularity of these …

Amazons is a board game which combines elements of Chess and Go. It has become
popular in recent years, and has served as a useful platform for both game-theoretic study …

The game of Amazons is a modern board game with simple rules and nice mathematical
properties. It has a high computational complexity. In 2001, the starting position on a 5× 5 …

Durak is a Russian card game in which players try to get rid of all their cards via a particular
at-tack/defense mechanism. The last player standing with cards loses. We show that, even …

Amazon chess is a machine game with high dimension branches, in which the first step is
more than 2000 actions, so it is an ideal test platform for search algorithm and Monte Carlo …

Numerous popular abstract strategy games ranging from Hex and Havannah via TwixT and
Slither to Lines of Action belong to the class of connection games. Still, very few complexity …

Phutball is PSPACE-hard Page 1 Theoretical Computer Science 411 (2010) 3971–3978
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Theoretical Computer Science journal homepage …