Positional s-of-k games

Abstract

We introduce a general framework for positional games in which players score points by claiming a prescribed portion of each winning set, extending the notion of scoring Maker-Breaker games. In the scoring variant, Maker gains a point by fully claiming a winning set, while Breaker aims to minimize Maker's total score. In this paper, we generalize these models for all k-uniform positional games by fixing an integer threshold s in {1,2,..., k} so that a player scores a point whenever she claims at least s elements of a winning set of size k. We refer to this class as s-of-k games. Such formulation allows for a flexible description of scoring objectives that appear in both theoretical models and real-life board games. We further investigate the impact of strategy restrictions on the achievable score. In particular, we analyze s-of-k games both under optimal play, where the score is denoted by SC, and under the additional constraint that Maker is restricted to a pairing strategy. The corresponding score in this setting is denoted by SC_2. While the unrestricted score captures the standard notion of optimal play in scoring positional games, the pairing-restricted score allows us to observe Maker's loss incurred by limiting her to these standard strategies. We comprehensively study s-of-k games played on regular grids, which provide a natural and uniform setting for illustrating the general framework. After developing several general tools for the analysis of both scores, we complement them by a number of ad-hoc strategies tailored for particular cases of these games, to obtain both upper and lower bounds for the two scores on triangular, square, rhombus and hexagonal grids.