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Think Scrabble as a race, without a board, and you have the foundations to play Bananagrams.
Players race against each other to build a word grid – just like Scrabble – using all the tiles in the game. Whoever uses all their letters first wins.
Design
Bananagrams is simplicity itself. The banana-inspired pouch holds 144 one-sided letter tiles and the game’s instructions. That’s all you need.
The tiles themselves are really great quality, robust and clear to read.
I still don’t quite get the whole banana-theme though. Not that it holds it back in any way, but its still feels a little odd.
Gameplay
Gameplay is relatively simple, though the random banana theme means you may have to consult the rulebook from time to time.
First, place all 144 tiles facedown on the game area. Then players grab their starting tiles – the number of tiles depends on the number of players.
When the game starts (someone has to yell “Split” – again with the weird banana references), players turn over their tiles and start making a word grid.
Importantly, you can rebuild and reshape your grid at any time, so long as all the words are still real words.
When a player uses the last of their letters, they have to yell “Peel” to make all players grab another letter from the main pile.
And if you’re really stuck with the letters in your pile, you can yell out “Dump” to trade one letter from your set with three letters from the main pile.
Once all the letters from the main pile are gone, the first person to use all their letters calls out “Bananas” to end the game.
Verdict
To be honest, this is a great little word game.
The weird banana theme can be a little off-putting. If you can ignore that, at its core Bananagrams is like a fun Scrabble speedrun.
The ability to pull your grid apart to make new words is great, as is the quality of the product.
If you can pick it up on sale, this is definitely worth adding to your collection, or giving as a nice Christmas gift.
Buy Bananagrams online
The product for this review was purchased by the author.
