Periodic Panic Game

Element tiles fall toward a lab, each drawn like a cell of the periodic table with its atomic number left out. Type the number to blast the tile before it lands. Every element you blast lights its cell in a small table at the bottom, so a game slowly fills the table in. Start with the first 20 elements, go on to the first 36, or take on all 118.

Element tiles fall toward the lab. Blast each one by typing its atomic number.

How to play

Choose the elements: 1-20 runs from hydrogen to calcium, 1-36 goes on to krypton, and ALL 118 is the whole table. Then choose what to answer with, NUMBER or SYMBOL.
With NUMBER, each tile shows a symbol and a name, such as Fe and Iron, with a question mark where its atomic number goes. Type the number on the keypad and press FIRE. For iron that is 26.
With SYMBOL, the game runs the other way. Each tile shows only an atomic number, and you pick its symbol from four choices.
The lowest tile is the target, marked with a bright frame. Tap another tile to aim at it instead, or press the left and right arrow keys.
A wrong answer drops the tile a step and shows the right answer on it for a moment.
A tile that reaches the lab bench puts out one of the five lab lights. When the last light goes out, the game is over.

Wave 1 drops 8 tiles, and each wave after it drops 2 more. A tile takes 14 seconds to fall in wave 1, and each wave is 7% faster, down to 6 seconds. With SYMBOL, one press answers, so tiles fall faster, starting at 9.8 seconds. Two tiles are in the air at once in the first waves, and later waves bring up to four.

No element comes twice until you have blasted every element in your range. When the whole range is lit, the table clears and starts again. On a keyboard, type the digits, press Enter to fire and Backspace to delete. With SYMBOL, press 1 to 4 for the four choices. Escape or Space pauses.

Scoring

A tile blasted on the first try scores 100 points, plus up to 100 more for how high it still is.
A tile blasted after a wrong answer scores 25, since its answer has been shown.
Lighting every element in your range scores 10 points for each element, which is 200, 360 or 1,180, and turns one lab light back on.

Your five best scores are saved in this browser for each range and each way of answering, with the wave each game reached. In practice, no lab light goes out, so the game goes on until you end it from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

Learning the periodic table

The game uses the names and spellings of IUPAC, the body that names the elements. That means aluminium and caesium, and the four newest elements have the names approved in 2016: nihonium (113), moscovium (115), tennessine (117) and oganesson (118).

Playing drills what you already know. To learn the numbers in the first place, a mnemonic helps. One way is to turn each atomic number into an image with the Major System and link it to an image for the element's name. Another is to place the elements in order along a memory palace, with one period of the table to a room. Memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements collects methods that people have used.

Try our other free memory games, such as Prime Factor Cannon for mental arithmetic or Palace Run for the memory palace.