Kayles

This article is about the combinatorial game. For the lawn game, see Bowling and Skittles (sport).
A row of bowling pins. On their turn, a player may choose to eliminate a single pin, or two adjacent ones.

Kayles is a simple impartial game in combinatorial game theory, invented by Henry Dudeney in 1908. Given a row of imagined bowling pins, players take turns to knock out either one pin, or two adjacent pins, until all the pins are gone. Using the notation of octal games, Kayles is denoted 0.77.