Disintegration (1974) - fun with nuclei

Wow, I found a game that's not even mentioned on BoardGameGeek.  Disintegration is a science card game from Relativistics, 1974.  I had this when I was about 13, so I first saw it in 1979.  The idea is to take a chart of the nuclides (all known isotopes organized by atomic weight and neutron count), put your pieces on lead (Pb), and play cards to decay your way all the way down to Hydrogen (H) without going off the chart or hitting a stable isotope which could never decay further in nature.  

Sure, that worked way back when.  It wasn't just nerdy, it was nuclear physics, with cards showing how alpha and beta decay and other nuclear events work.  Plus some cards called "Improbable process" where you can play combos that never happen in nature.

The cards are still fresh and new...

But we have since discovered hundreds of new isotopes.  So look at how crazy big the chart is now.  Even on a scale too small for the plastic pieces to fit in the squares, the first two thirds of the chart covers the entire table, nine sheets of paper.

It's actually an interesting situation.  I never could find another kid willing to play a round, but ran through some myself, and now the world has moved on.  I will see if I can make a scaled-down game board of reasonable size and variety.  Certainly, all the isotopes that exist for less than a millisecond can just go up in smoke.  Maybe one second is a good cutoff.  Or, if the average length of the game is 20 minutes then there would be a teaching moment in only showing isotopes that might last as long as the game.  ;-)

But maybe the chart was still huge back then?  The rules say to start on Uranium-235, explaining how that is atomic number Z=92 (92 rows up from the bottom) and neutron count N=143, which is 143 blocks diagonally to the top right.  That's a BIG game board.  For a shorter game, the little rule sheet recommends starting at Cesium-137, which is merely 55 rows up and 82 blocks to top-right.  I remember having a roll-out chart that was about 2x3 feet, and you might also find them as full size classroom posters.

Well, the numbering goes diagonally up from the lower left, starting with neutron (n-0) then Hydrogen H-1, so sheet 1 goes up to K-38.  At four sheets wide, four sheets tall you can get to Hafnium-151, which is only element 72, and we've only got Cesium out to 134.  So, I would have to print the fifth column of pages ... sure enough, the page on column 5 row 7 gets up to Einsteinium-238 but only gets us to U-231.

So it would take SIX columns of printed pages to show the full range of isotopes we now know about.  On the other hand, Uranium was always element 92, so there are 92 spaces to travel down the chart, so let's look at just that metric.   A few cards let you travel two spaces, and there is exactly one Nuclear Fission card per deck where you get to cut your Z and N in half, otherwise is is one space per card, so it feels like there would be 50-60 moves on average. 

The overall idea is interesting: learn about different kinds of nuclear decay and particle captures while trying to navigate down the chart, with all those stable isotopes (dark grey in my photo) to avoid, since landing there means you could never make another move.  But maybe a 2x2 sheet section of the board is a better size for actual tabletop play.