Game Spotlight – Bananagrams
Bananagrams, by Bananagrams, (which isn’t confusing at all) is a game similar to Scrabble if Scrabble had taken an edible and decided to do away with word scores. And also the board because who wants to be constrained by a 15 x 15 tile area when you can spread out to the limits of your table? Bananagrams still wants you to make word grids, because word grids are fun, but Bananagrams goes about it with less structure.
To start, everyone grabs X number of tiles (depending on the number of players) face down and when everyone is ready, someone says the start word (lemmie go look that up – Oh. SPLIT) and everyone flips up their stack of tiles to reveal the letters. It then becomes a race for everyone to use all their tiles correctly in an individual word grid. When someone uses their last tile after endgame is triggered (endgame happens when N-1 tiles are left in the pool – N being the number of players), that person shouts another word…hold on…BANANAS and if their grid is correct, they win.
Along the way, you will use all the tiles in your initial stash and need to grab more, at which point you would holler PEEL and every player then has to draw a tile from the pool. You can ditch a pesky letter (DUMP!) back into the pool but you then have to take 3 tiles to replace it. Worth it when you get those Qs without U’s.
The major difference between Bananagrams and Scrabble is that if your word grid isn’t working, you are free to tear it down and rebuild a new one. Or maybe just tear down part of your grid cuz AQUEOUS is an awesome word and you feel really boss for using it. Also everyone is playing simultaneously on their own grid so that’s different. Plus the only scoring is ‘whoever finishes first wins the round’ so no getting blown out of the water by your opponents going out on triple word score QUARTZITE. But other than that, just like Scrabble. More or less.
Things I liked:
- These tiles are really nice. They feel good and they make a pleasing clickity clack noise.
- I really love the free form word grids. And I love being able to axe part or all of your grid and tackling the problem of using your tiles in a different way.
- Realistically, the number of people who can play a game of Bananagrams is only limited by how many tiles you have and how many people you can fit around your table. In the base game the max is 8…but if you had 2 games of Bananagrams you could easily play 16 people and the play wouldn’t suffer any.
Things I didn’t like:
- OMG save me from the cutsie words. I have played many rounds of Banangrams and I still have to look up their danged words. Look, the English language already has words for “Go” and “Draw” and “Swap” and “Win” and they are perfectly reasonable words to use when you need to start, draw a letter, change out a letter or if you have met the winning criteria. And they are a lot easier to remember than…whatever it was I wrote up top there.
- I love this game A LOT but I am also a terrible speller. This game is not a great game for people who may have to ask themselves repeatedly how many Ts are in that word or is that word spelled with an O or a U?
- Every time I play this game I wind up tearing down part of my grid to use elsewhere and I forget to go back and dismantle the rest of the tiles I didn’t need to use in my new grid. I am the King-Emperor of shouting WIN with a word like “Arriv” or “Fores” hanging out embarrassingly in my grid. So if you are prone to that sort of thing you might need to just axe the whole word and have tiles nebulously floating around untidily until you can use them later.
