What simple formal systems are there that have behavior similar to actual chemistry? I've been doing reading about formal/axiomatic chemistry and am wondering: are there attempts at making formal systems (well defined rules that can be simulated on a computer) that have similar emergent behavior to real world chemistry in some way?

Clearly this would be very difficult for reproducing all of the physics of matter but I haven't been able to find any papers about attempts to make simple systems that have meaningful 3D interactions besides cellular automata which are very different.
The Lewis model (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3285721/) meets those criteria.