Digital Deletions
This game is taken from the book On Numbers and Games by John Conway (Academic Press, 1976).
What you need
- Chalkboard and chalk. (You can play with paper and pencil, too, but the erasing can get kind of messy.)
How to play
- Begin by writing down a string of digits (numbers) that's as long or as short as you like. The digits can be 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and appear in any combinations that you like. You don't have to use them all. Here is an example:
- On a turn a player may either:
- Change any one of the digits to a value less than the number that it is. (No negative numbers are allowed.) For example, you could change a 5 into a 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0.
- Erase a zero and all the digits to the right of it.
- The player who removes the last digit loses.
- The game that begins with the string of numbers above could proceed like this::
