Build a Polymer Chain

How to play

• 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 trail behind you.
• Collect every bead in the maze to win. There's no rush, but the clock is running if you want to compare runs.
• Touching O₂, the inhibitor, or the chain transfer agent ends the run, just like they'd end a real radical chain. Press restart and try again with a different route.
• Pick Hard mode above before starting for a shorter head start and enemies that chase far more relentlessly.

The chemistry behind the joke

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.