118 elements, one deck, and more ways to win than you'd expect — by atomic number, by group, or by what elements have in common, from the ten rarest to the ones named after a city. A new puzzle daily, the same deal for everyone, plus full games against the computer any time. You'll even learn some chemistry along the way.
One deal a day, identical for every player, with a themed deck and a score to beat: whatever the computer averages on those exact cards over a hundred tries. Three or four minutes, then you're done until tomorrow.
Scoring against a fixed target makes every day comparable — and makes a good day something you can show someone. Finish a puzzle and you get a share line with no spoilers in it: the shape of your result, not the cards.
Nine days a year the deal hides a word spelled out of element symbols — ATLAS, say. You're told the word; working out which elements spell it, and getting all of them into your hand at the same moment, is on you. The badge itself is worth no points. What it costs is tempo — you have to sit on those cards instead of melding them, and with fifty turns in a day, waiting is the price. The moment the badge is yours the cards are free again, and you play them like any others.
Draw a card, then play a set or discard. Sets need three cards — and there are three different ways to make one.
Sixteen properties run through the deck: the gases (11 cards), the elements your body needs (20), the toxic ones (10), the ten rarest, the five in your DNA — and eleven more. Any three from one category is a set — with one exception: there are only two liquid elements in existence, bromine and mercury, so that pair is a set on its own. The smaller the category, the more it pays.
Elements from the same column of the periodic table — these three are all group 1. Narrow groups are worth more, because there are fewer cards to find, and group 3 is narrow enough that scandium and yttrium make a set by themselves. The colors don't have to match: the stripe is the element's category, not its group.
Consecutive atomic numbers — 6, 7, 8. Longer runs score steeply, and in the two-player game emptying your hand first is worth a +20 bonus.
Most elements belong to more than one category, so the card you were about to throw away is often the second card of two sets you haven't started yet. Holding it costs you a slot; throwing it costs you the set.
The trackers tell you what's still unseen, and that changes the odds you're playing. Needing one more gas when nine are still out is a reasonable bet. Needing one more of the ten rarest when two are left is not. In the two-player game, taking the top of the discard pile also tells the AI exactly what you're collecting — sometimes worth it, often not.
And the daily is capped at fifty turns, so a long run you can't finish in time scores nothing at all, while two short sets you can finish score twice. Deciding when to stop building and start banking is most of the game.
Easy plays loose so a new player can win. Hard doesn't.
A live periodic table and category tracker show which cards are still out there — so it's planning, not memory.
Daily streaks and days beaten, plus wins, losses and averages for the two-player game. All of it stays on your device.
Every card is laid out like a periodic-table tile — atomic number, group, symbol, name, atomic weight, a color stripe for its first category and a code chip for every category it belongs to.
You don't get tested. You get better at the game by noticing which elements are gases, which cluster in a group, and which ones are rare — which is exactly the thing worth learning.
Tap the ⓘ on any card for a plain-English description, atomic weight, melting and boiling points, its categories with what they mean, its abundance in Earth's crust, and — for the 49 elements named after someone or somewhere — who or what it was named for.
Categories are the heart of the scoring, so you end up fluent in them: which elements are metalloids, which your body needs, which are radioactive in nature, which are liquid at room temperature.
Because groups score, you start seeing the columns — alkali metals, halogens, noble gases — as families rather than a wall of symbols.
Built-in lists like the ten highest melting points and the ten rarest elements, ordered and explained, for when a card makes you curious.
None of this is a separate study section. The whole periodic table and a write-up for every one of the 118 elements are built into the game itself — open the Strategy menu mid-hand and look something up, then carry on playing. Go and have a look; nothing to sign up for.
Chemical classifications follow the Los Alamos National Laboratory Periodic Table of Elements, and each element's detail card links back to its LANL page so a curious player can keep reading.
Crustal abundance figures come from the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 97th edition.
Two categories — Dietary Need and Toxic — are the game's own play groupings rather than formal chemical classes, and are labeled that way in the app.
The Android app and a printed deck are both on the way. Leave an email and I'll tell you when each one lands — nothing else, and never often.
Nothing. There are no ads, no account, and nothing to buy. A printed deck is planned, and there may eventually be a paid extra inside the app — but the game you can play today stays free.
No. Every card tells you its group and its categories, and the built-in trackers show you what's still in play. Beginners learn the table by playing it.
The daily puzzle is three to five minutes. A full two-player game against the computer runs five to ten, depending on difficulty and how long you deliberate.
There's no account, and the game itself has no tracking in it at all — your streak, your record and your saved game live in your own browser or on your own phone and never leave. These pages around the game are different: they use cookies to count visits and to measure advertising, through Google Analytics. If you're in Europe or the UK you're asked before anything is set, and declining costs you nothing. The only thing I ever hold myself is an email address, and only if you type one into the form above. The privacy page spells all of it out, including which part is which.
An Android version is in testing and heading for Google Play. In the meantime the web version works well on a phone — add it to your home screen and it opens like an app, offline included.
That's the plan. Elerummy started as a paper card game in 2016; a printed deck is in the works. Sign up above and you'll hear when it's real.
Yes, freely. No account, no student data, no cost, and nothing for your district to approve.