Chemical Cards

Back in 2009, I was working as webmaster at a computer hardware retail store which won a government contract to provide equipment and educational materials for public schools, designed to make sciences more attractive for students. Among the various stuff we were going to deliver, I designed two decks of playing cards, each one consisting of 118 cards, corresponding to the elements in the periodic table. One deck displayed the elements' names and atomic numbers, while the other one displayed the elements' symbols and atomic numbers, both set against a square background colored according to the family each elemnt belonged to, like this:

As far as I can remember, the games which could be played with these two decks were the following:

• Shuffling both decks together and using them for a traditional memory game, by dealing them face down on the table, turning two of them over on each player's turn, and taking out any matching pairs thus uncovered. Players would need to know which symbol matched each name, though they could also look at the atomic number.
• Shuffling both decks together and using them for a "Go Fish" style game, where each player is dealt a certain amount of cards, with the rest of the deck being left, face down, on the table. Each player in turn would ask the next player if he had a card to form a matching pair with another one among the ones he or/was holding on his/her hand, in order to lay them down on the table, and having to pick another card from the deck.
• I think the college students who were helping us came up with a third game, using a single deck, and dealing the cards among the players, seeing who had the highest atomic number, taking the other players' cards, and then proceeding with the next card he or she had been dealt.

Back then, several elements had been assigned provisional names, wit element 112's being Ununbium (One-One-Two), with the provisional symbol Uub. That was the name and symbol I used on the playing cards, when we submitted them to the printer by the end of September, 2009. However, in July 2009 the name Copernicius had been proposed, in honor of Nicholas Copernicus, with the symbol Cp, and by the end of September, the name had been  accepted, but the symbol had been changed to Cn. So, we had to quickly write an addendum and include it with the materials we delivered, explaining the change which had recently happened.

After running test games with the college students assisiting us, I had also proposed a further modified version of the cards, based on the game they had developed and my personal experience playing with "Quartett" or "Top Trumps" style decks with my classmates back then when I was in school, by adding further chemical parameters for each element on the cards, but the company wasn't interested, and the basic version was the one which was delivered.

Then, in late January, 2024 (almost 15 years later), while buying some supplies at a stationery shop, I came across a Periodic table of the Elements, which inspired me to finally work on my proposed improved version of the Chemical Cards. So, I went ahead and added more parameters to both decks, which ended up looking like this (split across 30 A4-size pages in landscape format, with the cards from the "symbols" deck at the top and the cards from the "names" deck at the bottom of each page:

The last page shows also the front cover for each dek, and the image for the back of the cards. You can download all 30 A4 pages here as a single PDF file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DggpQP6ApI2ERaVO4Z39GVF1NwTFgnQ4/view?usp=sharing

Or if you prefer, I've also made them available as 15 A3 pages on a signle PDF file:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aV9fEBfkWCqviEVzeEpkNLN5ntUdNWIB/view?usp=sharing

Now, if you print them, you may want to use the provided image to print the backgrounds of the cards, by copying it multiple times (4 times for the top row and 4 more for the bottom) and print them on the reverse side of each page before you proceed to cut the individual cards...

The additional games you can play now with this improved version of the Chemical Cards are as follows:

• Using the "symbols" deck, shuffle it and deal all the cards among the players, playing a 'Top Trumps" style game by calling one of the various parameters from the table at the bottom, where usually the player whose card has the highest value takes the other players' cards, and then proceeds with the next card he has been dealt.
• Using the "symbols"  deck, shuffle it and deal a number of cards to each player, leaving the rest of the deck face down on the table, and play a "Quartett" or "Families" style game, where the family or group to which each card belongs is indicated in the top left corner of each card, there being a total of 20 different groups, which are numbered from 1 to 18, plus the Lantanides and the Actynides. Groups 1 and 18 contain 7 elements each, while groups 2, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17 contain 6 elements each, groups 3 to 12 contain only 4 elements each, and the Lantanides and Actynides both contain 14 elements each. You can also group together groups 1 and 2 (making a total of 13 elements), groups 3, 4 and 5 (12 elements), groups 6, 7 and 8 (12 elements), groups 9, 10, 11 and 12 (16 elements), groups 13 and 14 (12 elements), groups 15 and 16 (12 elements) , and groups 17 and 18 (13 elements), in order to have larger groups (9 in total) with more similar sizes...
• Using the "names" deck, shuffle it and deal a number of cards to each player, leaving the rest of the deck face down on the table, and play a "Quartett" or "Families" style game , where, like the previous game, the block or family to which each element belongs is indicated in the top left corner of each card, with Block S containing 14 elements, Block P containing 36 elements, Block D containing 40 elements, and Block F containing 28 elements.
• Using the "names" deck, it could also be possible to shuffle it and deall all the cards to the player to play a "Top Trumps" style game using the parmeters from the table at the bottom, but since some of them contain a list of values intead of single ones, players would need to previously agree on how those would have to be handled...