Let’s Talk! – Periodic Table Games

Are you ready to switch off your screens and ponder or discuss another writing/conversation prompt from my friend Tyrean Martinson’s book? Here’s my take on it.

What a fun prompt today – or not, depending on where you parse the compound noun. To me, it holds a lot of memories of an auditorium-style classroom, back in the day, with a super-sized periodic table hanging on one wall. My very first chemistry teacher was a very kind and fun guy who really evoked interest in the subject. He was also good at explaining what this periodic table was about. Periodic tables stopped being a game to me after teachers changed. Maybe, I would have gotten along with those tables better had I had one of these periodic-table games that are available nowadays. Learning while playing a game sometimes might help a lot. It takes the life-or-death seriousness away that takes up so much space in a student’s mind.

If I parse the compound in another place, though, totally different memories pop up, that of periodic table-games. With the entire family sitting around a table to while away an evening, especially New Year’s Eve. From dinner through midnight is a long time, for sure, and my childhood family sat around different kinds of boardgames at the table. I was never a boardgame-type. I loathed these evenings. It was not so much about winning or losing; it was more about how long such games sometimes lasted and how much change there was within one round. If the entire family put every blocking stone against one member at Barricade, it started becoming boring. Or if the best plots at Monopoly ended up in one person’s hand, it merely became a game that justified its title. The only boardgame I ever liked was Trivial Pursuit; my family was never willing to try out that one, as they compared quizzes to being at school. To me it means a colorful mix of trivia and what I associate with them. Kind of a walk through my own experiences and lifetime, if you will.

These days, the only periodic table-games I’m playing are jig-saw puzzles. It’s not about winning or losing; it’s about discovering shapes that fit in a place and about colors that match. You can play it alone, and there are myriads of them out there. Even the Dollar Tree seems to have some pretty cunning ones. I have to admit, though, that I put a puzzle together only once – then I hand it on. Because a second time would not be as enticing and adventurous as the first.

Periodic table games … Seems you have to be willing to play in the first place, and I have never been that much of a player. I have always been the kind of person who preferred to craft something or who listened to or told stories. Not just periodically, by the way.