# nimsticks: LaTeX package for drawing Nim sticks and games

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

## Background

Nim objects could be anything, of course, but conventionally sticks or stones are used. There are various types of dot in 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]{}.

### 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 , Lua and