Build a Polymer Chain

• Move with the arrow keys or WASD, or use the on screen pad. Every bead you touch attaches to your growing chain, drawn as the beaded strand trailing behind you. Only the most recently added stretch is shown, tapering off into solution, so you're always looking at one chain rather than a tangle. The full count is in the HUD.
• Collect every bead in the maze to win the level. There's no rush, but the clock is running if you want to compare runs.
• Twenty-five levels, each named for a real polymer and tinted to match. Act one climbs from easygoing polyethylene to Kevlar; act two eases off briefly, then works up through the engineering plastics and super fibers to carbyne, the theoretical linear-carbon chain that closes the game. Every maze is its own symmetric layout, and the pace and the hunting sharpen as you climb.
• From level 3 on, side openings in the outer wall are tunnels: walk off one edge and you reappear on the far side. Only the chain end fits through, so a tunnel is a guaranteed escape from anything on your tail.
• Enemies start held in a cage at the center of the maze and release one by one after a brief pause, mimicking a classic maze chase game. The longer a level runs, the more of them are loose.
• You have 3 lives. Touching an enemy costs one life. Your chain end disintegrates, then you respawn at the start with the beads you already collected still counted. Lose all three and the game is over.
• Grab an initiator, the flashing hollow ring, to flip the tables for a few seconds. Enemies are quenched and edible, and running into one sends it straight back to the cage instead of ending your life. Four initiators sit in the corners of each maze, one per corner.
• Grab the heat, the flickering flame, for a 10 second speed boost. You move at double pace while the terminators carry on at their usual speed, which is the easiest way to clear a stubborn stretch of maze. There's only one per level, somewhere in the middle, so spend it well.
• Each terminator hunts differently, so watch which one is closing in. O₂ comes straight at you. The inhibitor ignores you and squats on the densest patch of unreacted monomer, so the beads it is guarding cost the most to reach. The chain transfer agent aims at where you are heading rather than where you are, and will cut you off if you hold a straight line. The rival radical mirrors your position across the maze and tends to arrive head on.
• Their eyes give them away: a hunter that has locked onto you is looking right at you, while one that is still wandering has its eyes elsewhere. None of them can turn around in a corridor, so once one commits you know where it must come out.
• Points come from repeat units, and from quenching terminators while an initiator is running. Each one caught in the same window is worth double the last, up to four, so clearing several on one ring is where the score is.
• On a phone you can swipe anywhere on the board to steer instead of using the pad.
• Pick Hard mode above before starting for a shorter head start and enemies that chase far more relentlessly, on every level.

This is a light hearted spin on a real problem in radical polymerization. A propagating chain is a radical, and radicals are indiscriminately reactive: several everyday species can intercept one before it finishes growing.

• O₂ reacts with carbon radicals to form a peroxy radical that is far less reactive toward monomer, effectively stalling the chain. This is why air free technique matters so much for controlled radical methods; see the Air Free Reaction Setup guide.
• Inhibitors are added deliberately to monomer stock (to prevent it polymerizing in the bottle) and scavenge the first radicals that form, which is also why an induction period shows up before a monomer that hasn't been purified starts converting.
• Chain transfer agents hand the radical off to a new molecule on purpose, ending one chain and starting another, which is exactly the mechanism RAFT is built around; see Polymerization Mechanisms for the real reaction schemes.
• Rival radicals show up once things get crowded on level 8 and beyond: two propagating chains meeting is termination by combination, one of the two ways a radical chain naturally dies even with nothing else around to blame.
• Initiators are the molecules that kick a radical polymerization off in the first place, splitting into fresh radicals that start new chains. Grabbing one here is a nod to that burst of reactivity: for a moment your chain end is the aggressor and the terminators are the ones running for cover.
• Heat speeds you up for the same reason it speeds up a real polymerization: raising the temperature raises the rate constant for propagation, so chains grow faster. In practice it cuts both ways, since initiator decomposition and termination speed up too, which is why a hotter reaction usually gives you a lower molecular weight.