Kayles of the planar variety

Before I knew much of anything about CGT and I was looking into the complexity (of "Who can win?") of another game, I saw a cool relationship: all of the "tricky" cases boiled down to solving a different graph game. In this game, a move was equivalent to choosing a node, then removing it and all neighbors from the graph. (Thus, with normal play, the player who can no longer select a node (because the graph is empty) loses).

How interesting! I should look further into this game! It seemed simple, but perhaps not simple enough. I looked around, but didn't know all the best places to look, and thus didn't find out about the exact same game---known as Kayles---until after I'd spent a lot of time figuring out things that were already known. Oops.

As it turns out, Kayles is a very fundamental impartial game, and it's not surprising that my Atropos situations were looking like Kayles boards.

Just knowing this name, however, opened up my resources greatly! Sometimes it's not what you're Googling for, but whether you know what you're Googling for is called. I was interested in the complexity of Planar Kayles (Kayles played only on planar graphs), which is still an open problem (as far as I know). Although we know from Schaeffer that Kayles is PSPACE-complete on general graphs, there are some other planar graphs which are efficiently solvable.

The most recent example I know of is from Rudolf Fleischer and Gerhard Trippen, who showed that star-graphs of bounded degree have been shown to be polynomial-time solvable by . This, as well as Bodlaender's result for graphs with small asteroidal numbers are the two results I'm a bit familiar with. Still, these do not answer the problem of playing Kayles on any planar graph.

Is there a general intuition amongst Kayles enthusiasts that goes either way? Does anyone have a good conjecture about the complexity of Planar Kayles?