TITLE: What surreal numbers are representable by Red-Blue Hackenbush games?
QUESTION [10 upvotes]: Every game of Red-Blue Hackenbush represents a surreal number.  Is the converse true?  Assuming that it is false, what can be said about the class of surreal numbers that are representable by such games?
For instance, it is obvious that this class is a group under addition, but I can't visualize why it should even be closed under multiplication.
Edit (by request): A game of Red-Blue Hackenbush is a rooted graph G whose edges are either red or blue.  It's helpful to think of the surreal value of the game G as the number of moves by which Blue is ahead.  The addition operation is simply the disjoint union with roots identified.  The additive inverse of a game is found by changing the color of every edge.  [Of course, this is only an inverse after passing to equivalence classes, which are surreal numbers.]
A finite path graph beginning with a blue edge at the root represents a positive dyadic rational number, which you find as follows:

Each blue edge that appears before the first red edge is worth 1.
Beginning with the first red edge, every edge is worth half as much as the edge before.
The value of the game is the sum of the values of the blue edges minus the sum of the values of the red edges.

This algorithm is presented by Tom Davis in pp. 11-13 of this paper, where you can find a full explanation of what's going on.
By using graphs with infinitely many edges, we can represent many surreal numbers.  If I understand correctly, the game {1|9} (for example) is not literally a Red-Blue Hackenbush game, but it is equivalent to 2={-1,0,1|3}, which is represented by a 3-edge blue path joined at the root to a single red edge.
Is there a surreal number that is not equivalent to any Red-Blue Hackenbush game?

REPLY [2 votes]: If you only allow connected graphs, and in particular do not allow ordinal numbers, the answer is no, unless you assign surreal numbers to Hackenbush games by a means other than induction.
First it's important to realize that, contrary  to what's stated in the question, not every rooted graph with edges colored red and blue corresponds to a surreal number. To assign a surreal number to a game, you can only handle a game if every move takes you to a game already handled, which means you can't handle a game if there is some infinite sequence of legal moves (for either player). 
This means a graph that corresponds to a surreal number cannot have infinitely many leaves, infinitely many loops, or infinitely many topological ends. Otherwise  we could move infinitely often by chopping off leaves, by cutting loops, or by chopping off ends. (For the third case, you can start by cutting off loops until the graph is a tree, then observing that if a vertex has infinitely many ends among its descendents, at some point oen of its descendents must split in such a way that at least one side doesn't contain all but finitely many of the ends, and you can cut off that side, then repeat).
If a graph does correspond to a surreal number, the graph is a finite graph glued to finitely many infinite paths. This is because after chopping off the finitely many loops, the graph is a tree with finitely many ends, hence finitely many branch points, and there can only be finitely many edges between any two branch points. 
Thus, the ordinal for when the game finishes is $< n \omega$, where $n$ is the number of infinite paths - i.e. we can bound the time until we are forced to chop one of the infinite paths, then bound the time until we are forced to chop the next path, etc. a finite number of times.
So you cannot express this way any surreal number that occurs in the generation $\omega^2$ or after.