Educational Chemistry Game

At first glance, your design seems feasible. You have chosen to adapt essentially a meld / set making system into chemistry. Instead of numbers and suits, players have a handful of components which they can mix to form compounds that earn them points (depending upon the commercial value of them?) If the math works out, it is actually a very nifty twist on the traditional set-collecting mechanic since it allows for complex combinations to emerge without resorting to abstract numerical combinations (eg. sets of 4s or a run of 5,6,7,8). In this case, the awkward properties of chemistry can actually be turned into a design advantage, as players search through their memory/cheatsheet for ways of using the combination of atoms they have on hand. Sort of like a bartender's guide.

However, here's the rub: No one wants a game that forces them to think, and that's precisely what the non-intuitive reactions of chemistry would do. The fact that they help you earn points will only be a thinly veiled facade that it is fundamentally an edutainment game assigned to them by their chemistry teacher with an emphasis on the education part. People don't mind being in an environment where thinking / learning will help them play better. Here is where Call of Duty, Magic and Borderlands come in. All these games actually prove that people's desire to learn is boundless if they are doing it for some other goal (such as killing the other guy). But, the thinking / learning cannot be the point of the game. That's called education.

Now... you're not going to like this idea, but a commercially successful game needs to give players a reason to play it. Usually having a compelling theme, competition and an aspect of fantasy helps. Along with a psychologically rewarding experience which includes a variety of different emotions. Perhaps if the points they earn were related to their grades in the class, that would help. But, they would only play your game begrudgingly. So I would suggest something far more fun. Turn your class into a bunch of bomb makers.

Chemical reactions are not just the kind of stuff that happen in a test-tube, they are also responsible for explosions, glues, paints and many other materials we routinely use today that people 500 years ago would have considered magic. The more that players feel motivated to put together these reactants to create compounds to produce effects that help them destroy things or produce other crazy magic like things, the more that they will forget that they are actually learning how to put them together. This is not really responsible chemistry, and probably won't fly with a chemistry department, but it is how players learn through games. So, if learning is your goal, you will find that if you design an interface where players can input different components and discover whether they produce any result that is useful to them in the context of a larger competition (a battle or an adventure) the students will spontaneously produce the knowledge you want them to have... along with a little bit of scientific curiosity too.

But, of course, you will have to tolerate a lot of failure in the process. There will be kids who discover how to make a stink bomb and that's all they will create for weeks. But, eventually they will either tire of it or figure out that it no longer works strategically as well as it used to, and they will try to find some other compound. Players learn from each other often. So, as long as players can see see what others are mixing/doing and the outcomes, they will try to figure out how to do the same. But, this is all premised upon drives of competition or emulation that really have nothing to do with chemistry.

From a chemist to a chemist, hear me out, good sir.

Well, what I'm seeing here from the people are... really not good ideas for a chemistry game. It totally pulls away from the game and makes it an educational laughingstock while not really making it fun and simultaneously making the theme pointless. This makes the teachers not like you, makes the gamers pass you by because it SOUNDS educational, and makes the entire reason for making a chemistry game, well, disappear. Remember, Darwinia was an awesome game because it was used the educational moral as a theme and didn't bludgeon you with education, but it was all based around the theme that they wanted to present. When stressed, you evolved or died. It was beautiful, elegant, and is the best example there is for a fantastic educational strategy game!

To make your chemistry game work, all you need is a better organization system! :D

Okay, so picture this. You have a primary status card (those who know me know I love these things!) with your boiler, mixers, centrifuges, mass spectrometers, whatever you want on that. For binary items (either you have them or you don't), a simple circle on the card on which you can slap a transparent disc to state to this world that I HAVE ONE OF THESE! would be sufficient. For the boiler and other such stepwise upgrades, I would suggest you have each upgrade on the card and allow the marker to slide down the list of better upgrades. This gives each player a quick and easy overview of their company's status. As a final note on this section, make every binary upgrade easy, while allowing yourself a bit more complexity with your boiler and other stepwise upgrades. Increased profits by X or X reduced time or ability to ignore X number of impurities (separation funnels?) are good binary upgrades.

For your cards, all you need is a good theme going. With each element, compound, or polyatomic ion in your hand, there should be a bunch of little symbols in the top right corner. Alright, so you have Chlorine. This can be the negative ion in a salt, so we have a (-) in the top right corner, cool. Also, it can be used in some covalent reactions, so let's slap a covalent (C) up there. If you want to stress electronegativity, you might not be going too far, but you might :P. For oxygen, you have covalent and combustion. For hydrocarbons, you have combustion. Furthermore, every card really ought to have a cash value on it. This shouldn't model the real world, but how hard it is to find a mate for it. If you plan on making acid/base reactions rare, make them worth money. People groan at the Q in Scrabble, but love it once it's played. You have a chance to do the same thing. For example, oxygen may be a gold mine in this game. If you don't have it, you can't combust. Period. Your options are to have lots of oxygen and make combustion easy or make one half of the combustion reaction worth a lot of money.

Anyway, giving a simple icon theme allows people who aren't gung-ho about education to get by and play an interesting little game, but will subconsciously implant the seed of what they're doing. Remember, people always learn. Always. Whether they want to or not. Your job is to make it so they don't realize it.

Make sure your ability to mess with the other players is robust. Backstabbing is a major part of nearly every good game and it would be a shame if you did not use it.

Good luck with the idea.

Better gaming through chemistry,
Gitface

I'm *not* a chemist - but I do really like science :-)

I don't know what commercial interests there are for different kinds of compounds, but I think I have an idea for the structure of a game.

you have a randomized deck of base elements (Hydrogen, Oxygen, etc)

Players could "buy" random cards from this deck (or have another draw mechanic).

Then there could be a 'build' action - in which they could discard elements to make molecules (I think that's the right term). So for example, I could discard 2 hydrogen cards, and 1 oxygen card, and take a "water" from a pile and put it in front of me.

You score points by "buying" them. water isn't worth any points, but if you take Sodium, Chlorine, and water you can make a reaction that's worth a quantity of points.

If you want to add some "complications" to the game - you can add "chill" and "heat" cards to the game to change the states of matter - so that you could Chill (twice depending on whether or not you want to make what is done at room temperature matter) carbon dioxide (build by discarding 1 carbon and 2 oxygen cards) and then add magnesium to get a special reaction.

So if I was designing this room for classroom implementation - I would figure out how many groups of students were going to be competing and then Build a scoring board - divide up the different kinds of scoring into areas on the board - and each time you score a reaction - you place a tile on the appropriate section of the boards. Examples might be - Tricks (like Briggs-Rauscher reaction), Explosions, Products (like Sulfur Hexafluoride), and Transforms. Maybe have like 8 of each on the board. Once a section is full, further scoring in that area is 0 (after the 8th explosion, no more explosions score points). This gets the kids looking at other kind of applications of chemical reactions.

Once the board is full - the game is over.

So... I have to major questions:
Do they like to play it?
Do you think they are learning chemistry?

And, a set of corollary questions:
What do you think they like about it?
What more chemistry do you think you can add?

It sounds like you have built up a system which appeals to the audience you want to target. Explosions, fire, acids, attacks, defenses and neutralizers are very intuitive concepts to anyone who has played a combat game, which is increasingly gender neutral these days. Meanwhile, the large numbers are absolutely ridiculous for a Euro Game, but Yu-Gi-Oh has shown how people like to deal with digits in the hundreds and thousands more than ones in the dozens and single numbers. Of course, mechanically, it is just a matter of tacking on an extra zero... but somehow I don't think kids quite realize that or care.

What I'd like to know is how expandable you feel the game is? Are all the components so intimately tied to each other that it would be hard to add other chemical reactions, or do you think that you have built a framework which accommodates a wide range of other chemical reactions in the attack vs. defense equation. It would be cool if the components ( ---34 Acids & Bases ---20 Fuels & Oxidizers ---30 Metals & Nonmetals ) had a structure which would allow them to be added to other components to produce other reactions. For example, electrical attacks and magnetic defenses from current (oxidation / reduction) producing chemical reactions.

In my mind, I envision a variety of attacks and defenses being produced by card combinations. So... you don't just throw one card at another person, you throw two or three or four. Of course, the acid / base attacks may be one card combos... but they should be much less powerful than multi card attacks and defenses. Something like a geometrical progression to damage would be cool... so 1 card does 100 damage, 2 card combos tend to do 300 damage, 3 card combos tend to do 600 damage.

But would be really cool and good for expandability is if damage was procedurally generated. Rather than having a list of damage per combo, or restrictive combos... somehow adding methane and oxygen just caused a huge explosion because of the underlying property of the system. I say 'somehow' because this is where the design challenge comes in. How to formally capture chemistry in an elegant way. What is it about methane and oxygen that leads to lots of damage... but when you put methane with iron, you get nothing... other than that the teacher tells me this?

This to me would be the magic solution to your question. A design which captures the emergent properties of chemistry from simple rules without requiring a reference chart. It is just happens to be the property of each of the agents in the game design that certain things happen as they would in real life.

Unfortunately, I know enough about chemistry to know that this is a very tough challenge. I also believe that if something works, you shouldn't fix it. So, as long as you feel like your students are learning what you want them to learn and they are now more curious about chemistry, perhaps a game with fiat properties is sufficient.

As a game designer, I would try to create something more emergent, elegant and generalizable... but fun comes in many forms... so it really has to do with your goals and how well it is received.

In terms of your actual mechanics, I have two thoughts:

1. Treat attacks like sorceries and defenses like instants. I think people will always prefer to be able to respond to an attack quickly than have to anticipate it coming before it happens. Especially since there is not a lot of signalling in the game, I think having the ability to defensively respond might work well. You might also give players pre-emptive defenses which are stronger, but because everyone else knows what you can block with, might be less strategically value since they can be circumvented easier.

2. Depending upon how hard combos are to create, you might consider allowing people to 'refresh' their full hand size at the end of their turns. This will encourage players to attack with all their cards before their turn is over and to plan over the other players turns how to allocate their cards to defense and attack. In a game with a lot of players, you want players to think when it is other people's turns as much as you can... not when it is their turn. So... if you want a lot of action and you want it to be quick, you should only allow them to draw after they have played. This mechanism should also encourage players to combo together because, even if they don't have the combo themselves, they know they won't get penalized at the end of the turn for using the card.

Finally, your system needs to pay a lot of attention to balance. In this case, you have no 'cost' system, so each card is theoretically the same cost. As a result, each card needs to be equally valuable on average with all others. However, it is always the timing of card play in a hand management game that makes one card (circumstantially) better than another.