nimsticks: LaTeX package for drawing Nim sticks and games

nimsticks is a package for LaTeX that should also work with LuaTeX and XeTeX, that draws sticks for representating games of multi-pile Nim.

By Peter Rowlett.

Background

Nim objects could be anything, of course, but conventionally sticks or stones are used. There are various types of dot in LaTeX that might look like stones, but somehow a line of dots didn't seem satisfactory. There are various ways to draw a line (e.g. just typing IIIII), including some tally markers (e.g. in hhcount). My problem with these (call me picky) is that they are all identical lines, and a `heap' of them just looks very organised. Really, I want a set of lines that looks like someone just threw them into heaps (though probably without crossings for the avoidance of ambiguity).

The way this works is it draws a thick vertical line in TikZ with a little wobble added so each one doesn't look extremely well-lined-up with its neighbour, achieved by adding or subtracting a small random number to the top and bottom coordinate. There are various built-in options to customise the size and colour of the sticks, and flexibility to draw heaps of different objects.

Licensing

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the conditions of the MIT license.

Changes

[2.0.1] - 2022-08-14

• Documentation tweaks

[2.0] - 2022-08-14

• Reworked to define sizes flexibly using ex so now responds to current font size, and provided scaling option.
• Added option to customise colour.
• Rewritten and expanded documentation, including how to fix randomisation seed and how to replace sticks by arbitrary TikZ drawing.
• Fixed: default display for \nimgame should be block but it was not putting itself in a new paragraph.

[1.2] - 2022-08-09

• Switched ifthen to etoolbox;
• Switched \begin{center} to \centering (because the former doesn't work in standalone documents and the latter doesn't add vertical space);
• Removed some whitespace that appeared to the right of the last heap.

[1.1] - 2020-07-19

• Added option to create inline Nim game using \nimgame[inline]{}.
• Added this and made other minor tweaks to documentation.

[1.0.1] - 2020-07-12

• Fixed typo in usage example in documentation.

[1.0] - 2020-07-12

• First working version of package
• Added \drawnimstick and \nimgame using lcg for the random numbers so it works across LaTeX, LuaTeX and XeTeX
• Added documentation