Four games played on a table

Question

Four well-known games (using American rules/gameplay) are being played on a table...

1. What is the game? What is the table? (Bonus: find a sugar)

noses, pons, cons, transit, worries, postbase, embrown

2. What is the game? What is missing?

     ?  
    sic  
   m. gone  
  nab Ben  
 heal flip  

3. What is the game? Who won?

sa?, t?e, ta?, s?b, po?, bi?, ?i, ?rb

4. Saw this text chain on my friend's phone. What game were they playing? What was ordered to drink?

-Nick! How are the kids? I heard Jimmy caught the flu. What about Janet?
-Sick as Jimmy. U?
-Lisa's better now. We're going out to Al's tonight. Has a good m. scene.
-M. scene?
-By that, I meant music scene.
-A q… can we go?
-Heh, you and Trish? Dunno, it's pretty exclusive. What are your credentials? 
-V.P., B.A.
-Boy, that should work. We're placing a food order. What would you like?
-Us? Wings.
-Heard they are good there. How ‘bout to drink?
-????!
-I'm on it. See you at 4.
-4? Sorry… we'll be a few hours late. In the middle of a board game right now.

Hint:

Seven words in riddle one
Can't add the sugar, the set is done.
Five lines in riddle two
No room for more, the game is new.
Eight in three, can't add more
For the game's already o'er.
In riddle four, six words in bold
The last two lines some clues may hold.

Hint 2:

Each of the four games are traditionally played on a different medium. The games are encoded using American rules/gameplay, I should have specified this up front.

Hint 3:

#2 - where have you seen exactly 15 elements in that shape?
#4 - this one is very tricky. The same game is clued 3 different ways (elements, italics cipher unrelated to chemistry, clues), and the elements (there are 6) are hard to spot due to ambiguities. Easiest solution path may be to determine the exact game from either of the other ways, and back solve.

Hint 4:

For #2: The position of Oxygen is a significant clue
For #4: Each block in italics is an acrostic, but if you found the following, you are on the right track:
7 or 28
3
5
1 or 2
5
1 or 2

Answer 1

^{Partial answer: I believe I have thus far managed to solve or contribute significantly towards #1, #2 and #3..}

---

The key thing to notice about this puzzle is that all parts relate to:

the Periodic Table! This is the 'table' referred to in the title and sub-puzzle 1.

Sub-puzzle 1:

This game involves:

finding areas in the Periodic Table where horizontally/vertically adjacent symbols can be anagrammed together to form the given words.

The given words can be derived like so:

NOSES = Red + grey (N, O, S, Se),
PONS = Orange + grey (N, O, S, P),
CONS = Yellow + grey (N, O, S, C),
TRANSIT = Light green (I, At, Rn, Ts),
WORRIES = Dark green + grey (W, Re, Os, Ir),
POSTBASE = Blue (As, Sb, Te, Po),
EMBROWN = Purple + grey (W, Re, Nb, Mo)

And to answer the bonus question, here's the sugar:

...with the sugar in question being FRUCTOSE! (Fe, Tc, Ru, Os)

So what game is it? Well, each word comprises:

exactly four adjacent blocks (i.e. a tetromino) - and, in fact, between them all we have a complete set of the different possible one-sided tetromino shapes: NOSES = the L-tetromino, PONS = O, CONS = J, TRANSIT = T, WORRIES = I, POSTBASE = S, and EMBROWN = Z. What game is dependent on these shapes and these shapes alone? That would be the video game, Tetris!

Sub-puzzle 2:

At first glance, this game appears to involve:

trying to form sets of words using an increasing number of symbols among the first 15 elements of the Periodic Table, without repetition.

The word sets already given correspond as follows:

SIC = Si (14) + C (6) = 2 symbols
M. GONE = Mg (12) + O (8) + Ne (10) = 3 symbols
NAB BEN = Na (11) + B (5) + Be (4) + N (7) = 4 symbols
HEAL FLIP = He (2) + Al (13) + F (9) + Li (3) + P (15) = 5 symbols

The question marks must therefore stand in for:

the only unused single element among the first 15 elements of the Periodic Table, i.e. H (element 1).

But what is really going on here, and what game is it? Well, look at this a different way...

...using the atomic numbers of the elements instead - particularly bearing in mind that the atomic number of Oxygen in the centre of the third row of the triangle is 8. What's occurring here is a game of eight-ball pool! The elements in a triangle shape represent the balls racked up in a triangle at the start of a game:


^{Source: Wikipedia}

(NB Note that while in some parts of the world pool balls are traditionally arranged according to a few set rules, here the players' main priority is just making words and phrases from the symbols of the elements represented by the number of each ball.)

Sub-puzzle 3:

This game makes use of:

a very specific 3x3 sub-grid of the Periodic Table - that with Tellurium (Te) at its centre (thanks to @Gahja in comments for putting me on the right track here). Note that all of the letters that appear in this part of the grid appear in the text of this question, either forwards or backwards:



Recall the question text: sa?, t?e, ta?, s?b, po?, bi?, ?i, ?rb

This involves As backwards, Te, At backwards, Sb, Po, Bi, I, and Br backwards.

What exactly is happening in the game?

Two players are taking it in turns to spell real words using the symbols in this part of the grid, either forwards or backwards, and adding either an 'X' or an 'O' into the spot marked by a question mark. Specifically, Player 1 is adding an 'X' to the symbols on their turns, while Player 2 is adding an 'O':

saX, tOe, taX, sOb, poX, biO, Xi, Orb

And if we plot these plays on the grid, it would look a little something like this:

So what game is it?

It's the pen-and-paper game, noughts-and-crosses! (Or tic-tac-toe...) And the second player has won by placing three O's in a row (despite not noticing they could have done so a turn earlier by playing Oi on turn 3!).

Sub-puzzle 4:

Still thinking...