Bond Raiders is a game I designed with the Colmena Design folks for an NSF/ATE grant that my colleague Catherine Lewis and I were awarded. This card game helps environmental chemistry students to familiarize themselves with the organization and the construction of organic functional groups. Its a fast paced card game where players collect ingredients made up of a variety of molecules and bond sets in order to gain points by building functional groups of varied complexity.
How it works:
Bond Raiders Card Game
The possible sets and related point system are outlined for players on a Functional Group Card,which acts as a recipe card for students new to the game.
Players begin the game by shuffling the deck of cards and dealing out four ‘quadrants’ of 16 cards laid face up. These quadrants make up a quarter of the full “table” of 64 potentially raidable cards.
Players then engage in four ‘raid’ rounds. Here players roll the four-sided die to determine how many cards they may raid from other players’ quadrants. They do this in order to trade them out for less valuable cards of their own. This is done with an eye toward building sets of the highest possible value.
Once all ‘raids’ have been completed, players enter the scoring round where they assemble groups from within their quadrant and tally their score. Sets of cards used in these groups are put to the side.
The final round of the game involves players rolling for the opportunity to assemble any group sets they might identify from cards available on the entiretable. When all possible potential sets have been built the scores are tallied and any remaining cards in a player’s quadrant are deducted from their score.
Bond Raiders was designed to coincide with a lab project involving physical 3D models of the groups. The color-coding of the molecule cards in our game matches those of the lab kit as well as other class materials. All terminology used within the game is not necessary for the game’s mechanics. As with many of our G-FMS science games, it is unnecessary for players to have prior knowledge of vocabulary or principles in order to play the game successfully, but these principles and terms become familiar and more approachable through the low stakes environment of play. For more advanced students this becomes an excellent study aid helping them memorize the make up and construction of organic functional groups.