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Friday night post-work drinks. A Thai meal washed down with a couple of bottles of wine. Not usually the ideal preparation to learn a new game.
So it was with some trepidation that after a meandering stagger back to our friends’ house, we agreed to accompany another bottle of wine with a game we’d not played before. Fortunately, Bananagrams is so simple that even if you’re finding walking in a straight line challenging, you can still pick it up pretty quickly.
Out of the box there’s not much to Bananagrams. Just a banana-shaped canvas pouch, 144 letter tiles and a single A5 sheet of instructions.
And the aim of the game is pretty straightforward too. Take some letters, arrange them into a free-form crossword, fastest to finish wins.
Add in a couple of nice twists and some banana related puns along the way and the pace and sense of jeopardy remains high.
Set-Up
- Tip out the tiles – enjoy the satisfying clicking sound from the high-quality tiles!
- Turn them all face-down – more frustrating; the tiles are perhaps a little small for adult hands.
- Shuffle them around a bit and take your tiles (11 for a seven- or eight-player game, up to 21 if you’re playing with 2-4). Leave the remaining tiles in the middle of the table.
Wait for it….
No peeking….
And “SPLIT!”
…The Race Is On
Turn your tiles over as quickly as you can. This is a race and you need to get word-building as soon as you can.
Arrange your tiles into an intersecting word grid. If you’re the first to use up all your letters, shout “PEEL”. Everyone must stop what they’re doing and take another letter from the leftovers pile. Revel in the glorious seconds of triumph when you’re the first to create a crossword - and you’ve disrupted your opponents’ trains of thought to boot.
But oh no! One bad draw and your opponents will quickly catch up. You’ve picked up a Q and don’t have a U – that’s not going to work. Shout “DUMP” and you can return your unwanted Q to the pile. You can do it as many times as you like, but you must take another three tiles each time in exchange.
The game continues with players manically arranging and re-arranging their letters and words, dumping, peeling and taking new letters until there are fewer tiles in the remainders pile than the number of players.
The first person to complete their crossword calls out “BANANAS” and is declared the winner.
But wait – the other players get a chance to inspect your grid. ‘Is Quire really a word?’ they ask. ‘Of course it is.’ you respond, ‘What would you ask for if you needed 24 sheets of paper?’
Avoid proper nouns, abbreviations or spelling mistakes or you’ll be declared a “ROTTEN BANANA” and will have to start again!!!
And that’s it. It’s fast-paced, it’s competitive and it’s a great game for families as well as the inebriated. You can play with up to 8 people and each game typically lasts about ten minutes, so as long as your players are fairly evenly matched, it stands up to multiple repeat plays.
Also, it is lightweight and compact, making it a good travel game.
Want More?
The out of the box instructions suggest a few alternative games. However, like the banana puns they’ve used to name the games, I feel they’re stretching things a little far here.
Banana smoothie involves dealing out all of the letter tiles equally amongst players at the start of the game and playing without the peeling or dumping – fastest to use all their letters wins.
Banana café is the same game as the original, but just using the first 21 tiles you take out of the pouch.
And banana solitaire is a race against the clock one-player variant where you try to beat your personal best time to use all the letters.
Bananagrams - Other Game Variants
If the standard option feels a bit straight-laced, there’s also a Party Edition, which introduces forfeits. If, like me, you struggle turning the tiles or need larger letters there’s a Big Letter edition. And there’s an entry-level game aimed at children as young as 4.