Papers

• The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine is NP-complete
  Frederick Reiber
  arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.11758 (2021)
  
  In this paper, we study the cooperative card game, The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine from the viewpoint of algorithmic combinatorial game theory. The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine, is a game based on traditional trick-taking card games, like bridge or hearts. In The Crew, players are dealt a hand of cards, with cards being from one of $c$ colors and having a value between 1 to $n$. Players also draft objectives, which correspond to a card in the current game that they must collect in order to win. Players then take turns each playing one card in a trick, with the player who played the highest value card taking the trick and all cards played in it. If all players complete all of their objectives, the players win. The game also forces players to not talk about the cards in their hand and has a number of "Task Tokens" which can modify the rules slightly. In this work, we introduce and formally define a perfect-information model of this problem, and show that the general unbounded version is computationally intractable. However, we also show that three bounded versions of this decision problem - deciding whether or not all players can complete their objectives - can be solved in polynomial time.


• Major Developments in the Evolution of Tabletop Game Design
  Frederick Reiber
  2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 
  Preprint
  
  Tabletop game design is very much an incremental art. Designers build upon the ideas of previous games, often improving and combining already defined game mechanics. In this work, we look at a collection of the most impactful tabletop game designs, or games that have caused a significant shift in the tabletop game design space. This work seeks to record those shifts, and does so with the aid of empirical analysis. For each game, a brief description of the game’s history and mechanics is given, followed by a discussion on its impact within tabletop game design. 

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