Tasty Chocolate Games

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate Chocolate Games. In Chocolate Games, each player cuts a chocolate bar into two chocolate bars and eats one of them so that they do not eat an indicated bitter block. The player who eats the bitter part loses the game. This game can be considered as a generalization of Nim, and previous studies consider the condition that for what kind of the shape of chocolate bar, the Sprague--Grundy value of the position can be calculated by Nim--sum (XOR) of the width and height of the chocolate bar. Higher dimensional cases were also studied. In this paper, we show that the ``Tasty condition,'' which was introduced in previous work for increasing staircase chocolate bars, can also be used for various other shapes of chocolate bars as a sufficient condition, or in some cases a necessary and sufficient condition, for the Sprague--Grundy value to be given by the Nim-sum of the sizes of the chocolate bar in each dimension.