A logic for reasoning about game descriptions

General game playing aims to develop autonomous computer players capable of playing any formally described games. The biggest challenge for such a player is to understand a game and acquire useful knowledge about the game from its description. This paper aims to develop a logical approach for reasoning about game rules. We introduce a modal logic with a sound and complete axiomatic system. The logic extends Zhang and Thielscher’s framework with two modalities to express game rules and reason about game outcomes. We use a well-known strategy game, Hex, to demonstrate how to use the logic to standardise game descriptions and verify properties of a game description.