Lab Notes

• Designer: Darrell Louder
• Publisher:Greater Than Games
• Players:2-5
• Age: 14+
• Time: 40 minutes
• Played with review copy provided by Flat River Group (distributor)

Class is now in session for Lab Notes! This roll-and-write game features the brain teaser challenge of putting together chemical bonds. Each round, a player rolls all the elemental dice for Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Carbon, or a useful but dangerous Bunsen Burner. The rolling player chooses their element first, leaving the rest of the table to scratch their heads to fit the remainder within their lab notes.

Elements now in hand, the players choose where to keep their elements. They can notate in the research field or trash them for some added benefits, later. Combine elements based on the real rules of chemistry! Double and triple bonds are worth more, but you can only bond with elements near each other and as they’re written.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure about what bonds work where. There are handy-dandy notecards outlining real, actual chemicals you can make! Manage to make the chemical on the card? You get a bonus! Lab fires burn a slot within your lab notes, but maybe that will work out for you, who knows!

To start the game, each player is given a scoresheet – which starts out empty with just a bunch of circles to be filled in as well as areas to draw bonds between those elements.  There are 6 dice (3 yellow and 3 white), and you build a supply of dice based on the player count.  The notecard deck is shuffled and two cards are flipped up.  Finally, one tool card of each type is chosen (solid, liquid, gas), and each player takes the same ones to put in front of them.

The game will be played in rounds until the player sheets are full and there are no more spaces to write in elements.    At the start of each round, the starting player rolls all the available dice and then chooses one to use and places it near themselves. This continues around the table until all players have selected a die.  The remaining die is the community die which is available to all players.  There are special rules for the Bunsen Burner icon on the yellow die which I will go into later.

Now, players Notate their elements onto their sheet – both the die they chose as well as the Community die.  The elements can be written in any empty space. If you want to connect a newly written element to an adjacent one, you can draw in bonds.  As you will surely remember from your high school chemistry class, different elements are stable with different numbers of bonds: (Hydrogen = 1, Oxygen = 2, Nitrogen = 3, Carbon = 4).  Don’t worry about having to remember this though – the top of your sheet gives you this info too!  You can only write in bonds to connect the letters you wrote this turn. It is also OK to not write in any bonds.  You can also choose to trash the elements by crossing out one of the trash can icons to the right of your sheet. You might earn a Bunsen Burner action by doing this (more on this later).

If you have made a complete compound; that is one in which all the elements have their full number of covalent bonds; you circle the entire thing and write the score down to make it faster in the endgame.  Single bonds are worth 1 pt, double bonds are worth 3 pt, triple bonds are worth 6pt, and of course we all remember that there is no such thing as a quadruple covalent bond.  If your compound matches one of the face up notecards, you score points – 6 pts if it is the card closest to the deck, 3 if second closest and 1 if third closest.  If a notecard is scored, discard the third furthest card (if any) and slide them all down, flipping a new card closest to the deck.  As you fulfill notecards, you will unlock more tool actions.

To remind you, there are three tools in the game, and you start the game being able to use them 3 times.  Each time you complete a compound, you place it under the tool matching the state of the compound, and this means you can use that tool for the rest of the game. When you use a tool, you cross out the number of spaces in the tool bar equal to the icons seen at the bottom of said tool card.  Obviously, you have to have access to enough spaces in the bar to use the tool.

When you flip up new notecards, you might flip up a Lab Fire card. If you do this, you must fill in any 2 empty circles on your sheet – you will never be able to place elements in these circles.  If you have the fire suppressant tool, you can use this to ignore the Lab Fire.  Speaking of fires, now I can talk about the Bunsen Burner die.  If you choose it as your personal die, the Burner causes a single space fire but then you can write in any element of your choice elsewhere on your board.  If the Bunsen Burner is left as the community die, the whole group fails for not watching out, and everyone suffers a Lab Fire (2 spaces crossed out).

The game continues until the end of a round when at least one player’s sheet is fully filled in (whether with elements or Lab Fires).  Any unconnected elements somehow burn up, and they are crossed out as if they were Lab Fires.  Any incomplete compounds are scored by adding up their bonds and then subtracting a point for each bond missing in the compound.  

Players can use the chart at the bottom of their sheet to score.  Tally up the points from compounds in the first box, the note card points in the second box and then the penalty points from lab fires in the third box (-2 pts per space crossed out).  Do some math: A + B – C, and the player with the highest score wins. No tiebreaker is mentioned.

My thoughts on the game

So, this is the followup to Compounded, which is Mr. Louder’s game from 2013 – which has gone through a number of revisions, and recently had a re-release last year.  This one still puts players in the wonderful world of Chemistry – but now, you get to actually draw out the compounds that you make.  Again, as a Chemistry major in college, I’m drawn to the game due to theme alone.

The game is interesting to me (because i’m a Chemistry major in college), and it’s neat to see the compounds arise out of the confusing mass of letters and lines on the sheet.  In the end, you just have to know the number of bonds that each element wants, and it’s easy to make a “legal compound” in the game sense.  I’d definitely recommend double checking each time you score a compound to make sure it’s done.  Of course, the chemistry nit-picker in me knows that some of the compounds on my sheet simply can’t happen the way they are drawn; but you’re limited to the orientation of the bubbles on the sheet – and hey, it’s just a game!

The game is as interactive as you’d suspect. There is a bit of hate drafting possible each round; but for the most part, you’ll hopefully get what you want when you’re early in turn order, and you’ll hopefully just get something you can use when you’re late.  The wild card ability of the Bunsen Burner can be super useful, but you have to remember that you’re taking a -2VP hit for the small fire that it causes; so you hopefully are creating at least a double bond out of whatever you are taking.  There was some discussion in our group if the best plan was to just take Carbons and Nitrogens whenever you can as they have the possibility for the high scoring triple bonds, and just figure out how to close out those elements in compounds when you were forced to take Hydrogens or Oxygens.

The tools can be the key to success in your game, and they will likely change in each game that you play, so you’ll have to figure out how to best use them.  And… you’ll likely need to make sure you are completing the compounds on the notecards so that you give yourself the ability to use the tools that you have!

Components are good.  The player sheets make it easy to mark down your elements and draw in your bonds.  As I mentioned earlier, it’s pretty neat to see all the circled compounds arise out of the confusion of the sheet. I really love the rulebook which looks like an old fashioned lab notebook.  The rules are easy to understand with good illustrations, though it looks like the example for Lab Fires is wrong on page 11 – so don’t get confused by that.  There are also a number of little rules which could have been explained a bit better – not sure why there aren’t 3 notecards in setup as there was a bit of confusion on our part when the rules talk about 3 cards and we only started with 2…

For me, this is the game that I’m most likely to pull out when I want to get my Chemistry geek on.  It’s easy to teach, it is quick in playing, and you honestly don’t need much, if any, actual chemistry knowledge to play.   As I’m a geek, I do get a kick out of plugging the formulas into Google so I can see what compounds I’ve managed to make (though admittedly some of the game legal compounds end up being only ionic compounds.  Just suspend your disbelief and go with it, you’ll likely have fun with the game!

Ratings from the Opinionated Gamers

• I love it!
• I like it. Dale
• Neutral. John P
• Not for me…