From pretend play to house-rules stick ball to hastily conceived tabletop RPGs, making up your own games has been a childhood staple for as long as there have been kids with ample free time and unbridled creativity. 14-year-old Anshul Samar has taken this to its logical conclusion by creating, and now actively seeking backing to help mass produce, his own science-based fantasy card combat game Elementeo.

The game is based on a 121-card deck of chemical elements, compounds and catalysts. Every card has an explanation of the element or compound's uses and chemical properties. For example, the Oxygen card can rust neighboring metal cards and the Copper Conductor card can shock any metals. The oxidation state of an element is used as its attack power, and its physical state determines its movement on the board. The goal of the game is to reduce the opponents electrons to zero through strategic use of each card's chemical properties.

With $500 in seed money from the California Association of the Gifted, Samar crafted a prototype of the two-player CCG that went on to wow them at entrepreneur conference TiECON 2007. And with a unique blend of personal ingenuity, scientific know-how, and a good, old fashioned fantasy slant, this story is sure to thrill GeekDads everywhere.

Link to the game's website, where it can be pre-ordered.

Which begs the question: what types of interesting and exciting games have you and your geeklings concocted?

Via Science Daily

Update: Aaron Rowe of Wired Science pointed us to a video of the young man himself, describing the game at the ACS Conference in New Orleans last week:

http://ustream.tv/LBBUVqpsUOz55NtWJ19nTSgqtbNms,XZ.usv