A vertex and edge deletion game on graphs

Abstract

Starting with a graph, two players take turns in either deleting an edge or deleting a vertex and all incident edges. The player removing the last vertex wins. We review the known results for this game and extend the computation of nim-values to new families of graphs. A conjecture of Khandhawit and Ye on the nim-values of graphs with one odd cycle is proved. We also see that, for wheels and their subgraphs, this game exhibits a surprising amount of unexplained regularity.