Hidden Gems: Compounded

By: Victoria & Jordan

Live the excitement of chemistry lab mayhem in our latest hidden gem pick: Compounded designed by Darrell Louder. Players compete to complete the most chemical compounds with the elements available to them. If it sounds dry or too similar to the chemistry homework you had to do in high school, it's not! Actually it's a fun way to get better at navigating around the periodic table.

Price: $28.95 at 401games.ca
Number of players: 2-5 players
Demographic: Ages 12+

Gameplay wise, Compounded strikes a wonderful balance between strategic resource management, luck, pseudo cooperation (you can trade elements or favors with other players but everyone is still in it for themselves), and competition while staying true to the science lab theme.

There are 4 phases to the game: 

1. Discovery Phase: Players obtain random elements from the draw bag to add to their workbench inventory
2. Study Phase: Players can place their claim tokens on any revealed compounds to declare their intent to complete
3. Research Phase: Players place their elements onto the compound cards to complete them
4. Lab Phase: Players tally up their current score from any compounds they complete and deal with lab fires

Upon completion, compounds will award players with a variation of atomic points, and/or skill level-ups to provide them with an advantage (for example increasing the limit of how many elements you can draw). Strategically, a player may choose to only pursue compounds that will level-up a particular skill tree, or choose compounds that are worth the most points.

Compounds are removed from the study area once they are completed and new ones are drawn to replace them. Lab fire cards are shuffled into this deck as well and if drawn they will cause flame tokens to be placed on all compounds currently in play. If a compound's fire threshold is reached it explodes and any elements that were placed on it are displaced to neighboring compounds.

The last round of the game is triggered when a player reached 50 atomic points or completes 3 out of 4 skill tracks. If there are no cards left to replenish the compounds then the game ends immediately. At the end of the game, the player with the most atomic points wins.

Social interaction in this game revolves around players trading elements with one another or promising to return favors. There's no rule stating that chemists must stay true to their word so be wary of playing with friends who like to cause chaos!

The Compounded: Geiger full size expansion was just released at Gen Con 2015, and it adds a more cooperative flavor to the game in the form of radioactive elements and compounds. It's in the group's collective interest to manage the radioactivity threat levels. Definitely a recommended addition to add more dynamism to Compounded.

Interested in this game? It's available to play in our board game rentals lounge, or you can purchase it in-store/online.