What would be some good ideas for a Periodic Table Themed Board Game?

You could use different brand beverage bottle caps for the pieces and have cards that ask the elements in certain materials with higher points for the more complex answers, and play it like a game of chess. You get what is water you move like a pawn, you get what is sucrose you move like a rook, you get benzene you move like the queen. I’m not sure what makes the king.

Play involves landing on squares, and answering science questions. Answering correctly gives you element cards. Combine the element cards to make water, or bronze, etc, and trade in the compounds to pick from the rare element cards. First to bingo a row or a column wins.

If you have done things such as nuclear decay, you could make a game where the goal is to move your game piece from a large radioactive element, along the chain of decay, eventually reaching a stable element. The decay chain looks like this. Each time the person answers a question correctly, he can move farther down the decay chain.

It’s hard to think of things that would be small enough. You might be able to collect things like mini eye droppers or capillary tubes, but I’m not sure that would count, since they’re not home-made. You could make small wooden blocks using the symbols for elements or using alchemical symbols for the elements (not the esoteric ones like “magnet”, but the actual elements). They would look cool.

Or you could find small pieces that are made of some of the elements, like a piece of wood for carbon, a salt crystal for sodium, a penny for copper, a piece of quartz for silicon, a bone for calcium, etc.

Or, how about dying a bunch of sugar cubes different bright colours, then giving each player a pair of long tweezers or crucible tongs (if you can get them) to move their pieces? That might be easy and fun.

The idea of using the periodic table is excellent!

The first step is to decide on what the purpose of the game is. Let’s say that it is to educate players on the periodic table. What information do you want them to learn?

Then decide on the best way to impart this information. Take a look at existing board games. (Why reinvent the wheel? Just select the one that best suits the objective.) Trivial Pursuit might work. For each of the 102 elements, a card is made with information about it. There are four color-coded categories. So, instead of a “pie”, the piece be something else. How about ring boxes divided into four compartments? The “pie pieces” could be small stones like these.

I have a young friend who made his own chess pieces from clay he and his family found on a beach during a vacation. He shaped, and fired them, and then painted each piece.

I’m not quite sure to what extent things must be homemade. You could use a wide variety of objects as game pieces, from cardboard to clay. If you have a set of checkers that you are willing to vandalize, you can paint the game pieces to be different colors.

How about Periodic Scrabble? You use 17 dice, each with 6 elements (102 elements total). A player draws 6 dices at a time and gets to roll them twice to come up with words. I have a coffee cup that has: “La B Te C H” on it. What’s that spell? Fun stuff.

If you do plan to use bits and pieces of other games that already exist, make sure you ask your teacher if that is allowed, and if you have to give credit to the designers of those original games. We don’t want you to get in trouble for plagiarism. :)

The pieces could be a copper penny, silver ring, little gold brick, and one other one that I can’t think of now without you having to get very creative like a mini glass of water, or mini salt shaker.

The board should be in the shape of the Periodic Table. You start out as a hydrogen atom and move to the element with the next atomic number until you get to lawrencium at 103. To move to the next atom, you have to answer a question related to it. For the elements toward the end, you will have to substitute other types of questions. There is not a whole lot to say about an element whose lifetime might not span the duration of the game.

After playing a few times, a person would probably get a good feel for the layout of the Periodic Table in the same way that most of us are probably familiar with the layout of a Monopoly board. An alternative way of moving would be to move along the columns of the element groups.