Two-player Domino games

Abstract

We introduce a 2-player game played on an infinite grid, initially empty, where each player in turn chooses a vertex and colours it. The first player aims to create some pattern from a target set, while the second player aims to prevent it. We study the problem of deciding which player wins, and prove that it is undecidable. We also consider a variant where the turn order is not alternating but given by a balanced word, and we characterise the decidable and undecidable cases.