A friend suggested the following combinatorial game. At any time, the state of the game is a (commutative) Noetherian ring. On a player's turn, that player chooses a nonzero non-unit element of the ring, and replaces the ring with its quotient by the ideal generated by that element. The player to make the last legal move wins, by passing the opponent a field.

So if the ring was $\mathbb C[x,y]/(x^2+y^2-1)$, and a player chooses $x$, the ring becomes $\mathbb C[y]/(y^2-1)$. This is a poor move, as his opponent can turn the ring into a field by choosing either $y+1$ or $y-1$, and win. A winning move would have been $x+iy+1$, which turns the ring into a field immediately and wins the game.

Problem: Given a ring, how can we tell if it is a winning position for the first player or for the second player?

(The game terminates since the original ring is Noetherian, and an unending game would be an infinite ascending chain in the original ring.)