My 10-year-old son introduced me to the following variation on nim. Instead of allowing the players to take any number of counters from a pile on a turn, the counters in each pile are arranged linearly, and then you can only remove A CONTIGUOUS BLOCK of counters. Here contiguous means no empty spaces, too. I am also talking about normal play, not misere play here, so that the person who takes the last block and empties the piles, wins. I don't know a general strategy for this game. Does anyone know if it has been studied? In the particular case he plays with his friend, the initial configuration looks like: Pile 1: 1 Pile 2: 2 3 Pile 3: 4 5 6 Pile 4: 7 8 9 10 where I have numbered the counters for clarity. Pile 1 has 1 counter, on the first line. Pile 2 has 2 counters, on the second line (2 and 3), etc. So on a move you could take counters 8 and 9, leaving 7 and 10, and then on the next move the next player could take 7 or 10 but not both, since there are empty spaces left between them. It turns out that in this particular case of 10 counters there is a forced win for the 1st player, who can take either 7 8 9 10 or 8 9 on his first move. Any info about this variation? Best, Jeff Shallit