The game of Cops and Robbers is an important model for studying computational queries in pursuit-evasion environments, among others. As recent logical explorations have shown, its structure exhibits appealing analogies with modal logic. In this paper, we enrich the game with a setting in which players may have imperfect information. We propose a new formal framework, Epistemic Logic of Cops and Robbers \((\mathsf{ELCR})\) , to make the core notions of the game precise, for instance, players’ positions, observational power and inference. Applying \(\mathsf{ELCR}\) to analyze the game, we obtain an automated way to track interactions between players and characterize their information updates during the game. The update mechanism is defined by a novel dynamic operator, and we compare it with some relevant paradigms from the game and logic perspectives. We study various properties of \(\mathsf{ELCR}\) including axiomatization and decidability. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore these games from a formal point of view where (partial) information available to players is taken into account.
