@theluthier there is an addon, the molecular script, which has been updated for 2.80 by scorpion81.
It combines Particles with Rigid body Physics and has many possibilities, but as far as I know, it only works on spherical particles…
The addon can be found here: https://github.com/scorpion81/Blender-Molecular-Script/releases
And Moby Motion has done some nice tutorials on YT on how to use the addon (for 2.7…).