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Toy Fair 2013 in London last month was full of card games of all types ranging from fast, fun, family ones to slow, solitary ones. Some of the best were on the Elemental Publishing stand so here’s a look at a few of the games we picked up there and have been playing over the last few weeks.
Elemons
Elemons is a new combative card game and free app that uses cartoon characters called Elemons to teach basic chemistry principles.
State Mode is the first of a series of games that will appear in the range and introduces the first 12 characters, including Carbomon, Chloromon and Oxymon, in a starter deck that allows for battles to take place right out of the box.
Along with the nicely illustrated character cards are a deck of heating and cooling cards that alter your Elemon by the value of the card. Heating or cooling Elemons changes their state. For example, Bromon exists as a liquid if you choose not to play a temperature card with him, but a cooling card of a value of one or more changes him to a solid. Similarly, a heating card value of one or more changes him to a gas.
Battles consist of multiple rounds, during each round players select an Elemon and a heating or cooling card from their hand. They can also select the neutral temperature card if they do not wish to alter their Elemon’s state. Players then reveal their cards and thus the state of their Elemon.
Rounds are decided using the rock-paper-scissors mechanism: Gas engulfs Solid, Solid splashes Liquid, Liquid disperses Gas. If a round is drawn then both players move their Elemons to the bottom of their draw pile. If a player wins then he/she takes their opponent’s Elemon and creates a pile of steals. The first player to steal ten Elemons wins the battle.
Elemons does a good job of sneaking in some learning during games. Each of the character cards has a short profile included which slips in facts about that element’s properties. Bromon’s high-tech suit can’t stop his noxious fumes and Oxymon has a bit of an explosive side.
The State Mode battles are a great way for helping with the concept of changing the state of materials by changing temperature, and the need to think about what state to play a character in will help engage kids with the idea even more. More games are planned which will bring in other facts about the Elemons. The cards already include details such as each Elemon’s atomic number and several other symbols that will come into play in later games, including symbols that seem to refer to the element’s group/family on the periodic table. It will be interesting to see what other games are revealed in the future.
Symbotica
Symbotica is a deceptively simple card game that can be played in four different ways, from a solo challenge to a six person tactical battle.
Each of the square cards has one of five shapes printed on it, in one of seven possible colors. In the standard game, each player is given a pile of cards, player one begins by placing their top card on the table, play then continues with each player in turn attempting to place their top card beside the cards already laid down to form a grid no larger than eight cards by eight.
Cards can be placed if they are either the same shape or color as a card already down that has a space beside it. Scoring differs slightly between the standard and simple games. In the standard game, the score for each turn is calculated by multiplying the number of sides of the shape on your card by the number of sides of the shapes it is placed beside.
For example, if I were to place a five-sided pentagon to the left of a four-sided square and below a three-sided triangle, my score for that turn would be as follows:
(5x4)+(5x3) = 35
The simple game tweaks this by using addition instead of multiplication, which also leads to a smaller difference between scores. In the standard game, the largest possible score on a turn is 100 and the smallest possible score is 1. In the simple mode, this gap is narrower with the largest possible score 25 and the smallest 2.
Other variants of the game include the solo challenge in which you draw cards one at a time from a shuffled deck and try to get as close as possible to a full 8x8 grid of 64 cards and five-card Symbotica which adds a tactical element to the game as players have to choose from among the five cards in their hand to play in order to maximize their score, cut off good cards for others yet not block in the shapes and colors they will need later.
Symbotica is a brilliant game for teaching as you play. The recommended age is 5+ but with some tweaking I was able to play with my three-year-old who loved finding places for each card.
The game also helped reinforce his colors and allowed me to introduce a few new shapes to his vocabulary, such as the pentagon, when he asked. For older children,the scoring mechanism is a great opportunity for teaching addition and later multiplication at home, just let them help out working out the score after each person's turn.
Adults gain something too as your spacial awareness is tested as you try and build up a grid that won't come back to punish you later in the game. Symbotica really is a game for everyone.
Top Careers
Top Careers is basically Top Trumps with an identical play mechanic that I doubt I have to explain here.
The three available themes are all based on S.T.E.M. careers: science, engineering and maths. Each deck contains 30 career cards with an illustration of a person performing that job, the job stats used to play the game and a fairly detailed description of what that job entails.
I was very happy to note that the illustrations in each pack equally depict men and women and don’t stick to stereotypes such as only putting the women in positions involving animals and children. The science deck alone shows a female research chemist, physicist and forensic scientist amongst others.
The text on each card is simple enough for tweens upwards to understand whilst still providing a valuable insight into that career. Some of the cards seem a little more vague than others but then it is far easier to explain the job of a math teacher than that of a cosmologist or a fluid mechanics researcher.
My husband and I played all three decks and found ourselves commenting on the cards (“oh so that’s what an actuary does!”) and debating the relative merits of the scores that had been assigned.
The three decks all score using the same five items: Travel, Communication, Numeracy Skill, Computer Skill and Technical Skill. We often found ourselves disagreeing with the score on a card (“how does an accountant have a lower numeracy skill than an avalanche researcher?” “how can a science journalist have a technical skill score of zero?”) but this forced us to engage with the cards more than we would have done otherwise.
There is little subtlety in the educational value of this game, stealth learning is unlikely to happen as it’s fairly obvious what knowledge the cards are trying to impart. However, as a tool for opening discussions into S.T.E.M. careers, Top Careers is brilliant.
I would love to see these card decks in every school where kids can access them during recess and free periods in the hopes that young people might pick them up and start playing with them between classes.
Copies of Elemons, Symbotica and Top Careers were provided free for this review. Elemons and Symbotica are both also available via the Apple App Store.
