Questions tagged [board-games]
A board game is a game that involves counters or pieces moved or placed on a "board" according to a fixed set of rules.
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Can you checkmate a king you can't see?
Motivation
If you play bullet chess with time management skills as poor as mine, you often end up in endgame situations that require delivering checkmate by playing several premoves in a row. For ...
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Worst peg solitaire game
I wonder if there is an algorithm for the worst game to keep as many pegs as possible.
I tried to search for "peg solitaire worst score/ max leave" etc, but it’s not quite that.
The question ...
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Deadlock possible in Minefield?
A deadlock is a position in which neither player has won and neither player has a legal placement available. My question is, "Can you find a deadlock position in Minefield?" And, if you ...
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Are draws possible in the game Nakatta?
I'd like to know if this game can end in a draw:
Nakatta is a connection game for two players: Black and White. It is played on the intersections (points) of an initially empty square grid (board). ...
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The ultimate backgammon
The following position, where one player has borne off all their checkers while all of the other player's checkers are on the bar (thus losing a backgammon), is reachable by a legal sequence of dice ...
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Catch the flag!
On a small island somewhere in Europe, a battle is fought in the middle of World War II.
Two armies, blue and red, have strategically positioned their troops against each other.
For convenience, the ...
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Logic and Geometry Problem #6
Is it possible for a deadlock to occur in Necklace? Can there be a square on which neither Red nor Blue can place a stone?
If it is possible, I need to see an example of that.
If a deadlock is not ...
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Count Pips Like a Backgammon Boss
In Backgammon, the pip count of a position is the total distance your happy stars need to travel in order to reach your home board and complete the bear-off. Pips refer to the number of dots on your ...
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Two-Move Chess Game
Consider a standard game of chess. We make the following modification: on a turn,
if a player makes a move which neither captures a piece nor puts their opponent’s
king in check, then they may make a ...
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King 2 men, but don't kill a man
I found mention of this challenge in a Science paper called "Checkers is solved" from 1996, but no example was given.
Beginning at starting position, play moves according to rules of ...
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Are there forced cycles in this game?
Players: Black and White.
A crosscut is a 2x2 subgrid with two white and two black stones, in which like-colored stones are diagonally adjacent (and opposite-colored stones are orthogonally adjacent)....
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Are infinite loops possible in the game Prodway?
I'd like to know if infinitely repeating sequences of moves (i.e. cycles) are possible in the following game:
Prodway is a game for two players (Black and White) that is
played on an initially empty ...
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Counting Tic-Tac-Toe draws on larger grids
Alice and Bob play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe on a grid of size $N \times M$. The rules of this game are the same as the original Tic-Tac-Toe:
Alice plays first (white); Bob plays second (black).
On each ...
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Are infinite loops possible in the game Reneo?
I'd like to know if infinitely repeating sequences of moves (i.e. cycles) are possible in the following game:
Reneo is a game for two players (Black and White) that is played on an
initially empty ...
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Logic and geometry problem 2
My question is whether or not a deadlock can occur in Crisscross. A deadlock is defined as a position, an arrangement of checkers, in which the board has been filled but neither player has won.
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A Drink and a Game
I saw this text chain on my friend's phone. What was ordered to drink?
To answer, you'll need to figure out the name of the game they were playing. I'm sure you've heard of it. There are a few subtle ...
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Logic and geometry problem
My question is whether or not cycles can occur in the abstract game, Clearcut.
Clearcut
A few smart guys (and me) have been trying to either find a cycle or prove that one can't happen. Ten days ...
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Zigzag nim game [duplicate]
I'm trying to figure out a strategy for the following nim:
here the rules are that you choose a new position on the path $1$,$2$, or $3$ nodes forward. The other player does the same. Neither player ...
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Trippples - optimisation [closed]
Trippples
Introduction
Tripples (BGG) is a board game from the 1970s.
It is played on an 8x8 grid, and each tile on that grid (except the corner starting tiles, and four blank tiles) contain three ...
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I ask you to find a game, then a place in the game and finally make a screenshot
Clues to find the game:
I drive a lot.
Everything I eat tends to poison me.
Passion neon.
Do you like kombucha?
Clue for location in the game:
boys, boys, boys (I’m looking for a good time)
Clue ...
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Riley Riddle in the game
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
My first can hold flags (No matches).
My second lasts three months (No matches).
My last is your attention (1 accurate match).
My ...
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"Guess Where?" - a GCHQ word association puzzle (board game edition)
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
Instructions (adapted from The GCHQ Puzzle Book (2016) and the introductory puzzle here on Puzzling Stack Exchange): The words in ...
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Circuissonne Diagrams
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
And also, this puzzle is also a parody of XKCD's 730.
We're starting a project on Explain XKCD (link currently not available) to ...
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Trochaic hexameter
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
I was visiting the club yesterday, and I saw some people playing a weird word game araound a table. They use Scrabble-like tiles ...
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Themed Boggle Grids Continued
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
Click here for the rules.
Here are some more themed Boggle grids that I created or discovered. Some of these may be references to ...
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Farthest From Backgammon
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
The famous Backgammon game can be seen as being played on a number axis with one player on the non-negative side (from 0 to 25) and ...
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The body in the cellar
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
On a cold December night in 1992, several guests have arrived at a mansion in Beverly, Massachusetts.
An hour later, the body of ...
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From white to black
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
Place a knight on each of the white squares on the 8x8 chessboard. That would make a total of 32 knights.
Is it possible to use a ...
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Sixty-three knights on a chessboard
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
If we're using rooks, then this would be equivalent to a classic "fifteen puzzle" though on a larger grid. This time we'...
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Colorblind Mastermind
This puzzle is part of the Monthly Topic Challenge #7: Board games.
Inspired by the incident, I created a variant of Mastermind, although it wasn't actually intended for colorblind people. The main ...
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What is this number square puzzle called? (10x10 grid with numbers 1-100)
Does anyone happen to know a name for this traditional(?) number square puzzle/game?
The puzzle has a board of 10x10 squares that are initially empty. The player starts the game by entering the number ...
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Cannot solve Ubongo Extreme B37 yellow puzzle
How can we solve the yellow B-37 puzzle?
Ubongo Extreme rules recap: Rearrange the pieces so they form the shape given on the card, with no holes and no overlap. Flipping pieces over (to turn a piece ...
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A Key Game of Battleship
What two relevant words are encoded in this game?
The stuff in the trays doesn't matter too much
No special knowledge or programming needed.
Hint:
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Pit of Radiance - A study on board games
(Click to enlarge)
(Author Note) A while ago I made some puzzles for a now defunct puzzle hunt project, here's one of them. The answer to this (and most other puzzles of said hunt) is a single word. ...
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Smallest number of moves to reach a "reverse checkers" position
A "reverse checkers" position is a position where every piece for one player is on one colour and every piece for the other player is on the other colour. Consider this position, for example:...
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Police and Thieves
I played this game when I was young, but cannot find it online. It is played on a checkers board (e.g. the black squares of a chess board) between two players P and T. The game goes as follows:
P ...
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Who wins the game of "Sticky Gomoku" on an infinite board?
This is a Gomoku like game, played by two players with Go pieces (black and white stones) on an infinite (in all four directions) Go board.
Rules
Four in a row: players alternate turns placing a ...
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What is the most STAMINA-efficient strategy to escape the well?
You are roleplaying as an adventurer under the direction of a sadistic DM who has just thrown your character down a well.
In order to escape, you have unlimited chances at a STAMINA check, difficulty ...
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A solitaire Blokus problem on a rectangular board
Rules
As in Blokus, you have a total of 21 pieces (every piece from monomino to pentomino) in hand:
All of these polyominoes are free, this means that you can rotate or flip them as you wish before ...
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Peg Solitaire variant: from 48 on an 8x8 board
Looking at David Ahl's Basic Computer Games, one of the programs that caught my eye was One Check.
It's like Peg Solitaire, which I've figured, but it's on an 8x8 board with the 4x4 inner bit hollowed ...
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Only kings and horses
This is the fourth entry in my decentralised or "Swiss" chess mini series. See bottom for a recap of the modified rules of Swiss chess.
Enough warm up! It is time for a proper Swiss chess ...
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Shooting them blanks (double optimization task)
I don't know the answer, I just state that this problem could be interesting.
Best estimate gets the tick.
"Battleships" game field (at least, in the USSR version I used to play) is a 10x10 ...
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But She Don't Care
Eve was visiting Alice and Carol's house and looking through the stuff on their side table, as she does. Eventually, Alice came back from the kitchen and Eve waved a piece of paper she had found in ...
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Advantage, Black!
In chess, the white player makes the first move. It is generally understood that this gives white a minor advantage, with a win rate of 52-56%.
In this initial position, white actually has checkmate ...
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Chain Puzzle: Tabletop Games #10 – Risky Finale
This is the tenth and final Chain Puzzle in the Tabletop Games series, in which all puzzles are themed around board games, card games, tile games, and the like. Once this puzzle is solved, this Chain ...
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Plus-sized amoeba escapes
As an extension to @WhatsUp 's question here, the rules of which are included below, with the following differences:
In one of the squares, there lives an amoeba (marked as a circle in the following ...
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Amoebas escaping the prison
There is an infinite grid of squares.
In one of the squares, there lives an amoeba (marked as a circle in the following pictures).
Amoebas cannot move, but they can perform their unique action: an ...
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Chain Puzzle: Tabletop Games #09 - “The” Cryptic Movies
This is the ninth Chain Puzzle in the Tabletop Games series, in which all puzzles are themed around board games, card games, tile games, and the like. The answer to this puzzle is a thematic word or ...
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Chain Puzzle: Tabletop Games #08 - Targui, or not Targui
This is the eighth Chain Puzzle in the Tabletop Games series, in which all puzzles are themed around board games, card games, tile games, and the like. The answer to this puzzle is a thematic word or ...
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