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Two players alternate placing kings on a $6\times6$ chessboard, such that no two kings are allowed to attack each other (not even two kings placed by the same player). The last person who can place a king wins. Which player has a winning strategy?

Recall that, in chess, a king attacks the eight neighboring squares. (Incidentally, this problem is the same as placing $2\times2$ nonoverlapping boxes on a $7\times7$ grid.)

For an odd-sized board, the first player has a winning strategy: go in the middle and then mirror the other person's moves. For a $2\times2$ the first player wins trivially; for a $4\times 4$ the second player wins regardless of strategy (it will always end after four kings are placed). $6\times6$ is the first nontrivial case: while there can be at most nine kings on the board at once, the game could theoretically end after as few as four moves.

Ideally I'd like to know the answer for a general $n\times n$ board, but I figured I'd start small and work my way up. $6\times6$ proved trickier than I had anticipated.

Akiva Weinberger
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2 Answers2

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I wrote some code to bash the nim values; a $6\times 6$ grid is a win for the first player with nim value $1$, by playing in any of the purple squares below:

                              enter image description here

If the first player plays in the middle of a $3\times 3$ quadrant, the following diagram shows their winning responses to any of the second player's replies:

enter image description here

RavenclawPrefect
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    The next step would be to see if there's a human-viable strategy hidden here. (Perhaps even a generalizable one.) – Akiva Weinberger Jan 23 '24 at 21:08
  • It's not very elegant, but I think it's pretty human-viable to memorize at least one winning reply to all of P2's first moves in the diagram above and then just brute force whatever's left after they respond (by that point there are already four kings on the board so the game tree should be fairly small). Note that by symmetry the memorization task only involves 15 things rather than 27, and 8 of those 15 can be countered by a single response. I see some helpful mnemonics - eg if P2 plays on the far edge of the L left over by your first move, it's always a winning move to mirror them. – RavenclawPrefect Jan 23 '24 at 21:43
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    Another reasonable question would be: for odd sized boards, we know that the center is a winning move…. but what other winning first moves are there? – Akiva Weinberger Jan 24 '24 at 18:28
  • For the $3\times 3$ and $5\times 5$, I believe it's just the center. Certainly none of the other cells in the central $3\times 3$ region can work, since mirroring them produces a symmetric board and also forbids the center. – RavenclawPrefect Jan 24 '24 at 18:59
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Here’s Java code that computes the value of the game on the $n\times n$ board up to $n=8$. The results for $n=6$ coincide with those in RavenclawPrefect’s answer. For $n=8$, the first player loses whatever they play.

joriki
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