ABSTRACT: Consider an Old-West duel, with two gunfighters facing off. Mathematically, this is a simple game between two players. Under reasonable assumptions, it is obvious that the winner is most often the faster and more accurate gunfighter. Now consider a similar situation between three gunfighters, all opposing each other. This is called a truel. (A truel occured at the end of the movie "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", for example.) We look at truels, and see that the winner is most often the fighter we wouldn't expect.

We generalize truels to an arbitrary number of gunfighters, and with possible obstacles between some of the fighters. That is, some fighters can't shoot at each other. We can model this with points for gunfighters, and where a line exists between two points if the corresponding gunfighters can fire at each other. Such an object is called a graph, and so we call these general gunfights "gruels". We look at some gruels, and see that in these cases, winning the gruel is not the same as being the fastest gunfighter!