Trail Trap: a variant of Partizan Edge Geography

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a two-player graph game called Trail Trap, providing algorithms for trees, characterizing winning strategies, and proving NP-hardness for general graphs, with results on bipartite and grid graphs.

Contribution

It introduces algorithms for determining winning strategies on trees and proves NP-hardness for general graphs, advancing understanding of Trail Trap's computational complexity.

Findings

Polynomial-time algorithm for trees

NP-hardness on connected bipartite planar graphs

Winning strategies characterized for certain bipartite and grid graphs

Abstract

We study a two-player game played on undirected graphs called {\sc Trail Trap}, which is a variant of a game known as {\sc Partizan Edge Geography}. One player starts by choosing any edge and moving a token from one endpoint to the other; the other player then chooses a different edge and does the same. Alternating turns, each player moves their token along an unused edge from its current vertex to an adjacent vertex, until one player cannot move and loses. We present an algorithm to determine which player has a winning strategy when the graph is a tree and partially characterize the trees on which a given player wins. Additionally, we show that it is NP-hard to determine if Player~2 has a winning strategy on {\sc Trail Trap} from the starting position, even for connected bipartite planar graphs with maximum degree $4$. We determine which player has a winning strategy for certain subclasses of complete bipartite graphs and grid graphs, and we propose several open problems for further study.