I come from a family where Scrabble is played with great seriousness and great regularity. Whist card games are a feature of my childhood. Scrabble is a feature of my lifetime. Other word games have come and gone but Scrabble is a constant so I was very interested to see how my family would react to Bananagrams.
Bananagrams is a speed game. The object of the game is to use all your tiles to make horizontal and vertical grid of words. The faster you can use your tiles the faster you can pick a new tile and increase the size of your grid. This is the reason that my mum aka past grand master of Scrabble, didn’t get on with it. She likes to take her time and stratagise. Games of Scrabble in my house last for hours literally and this is the reason why my mum always managed to gain the advantage and the triple letter score.
I have also played this game with young people ( ages 8 – 16) and they love it game. They pick it up quickly and run with with. For those that are not confident readers, the chance to repeat words and to use short words is in their favour – along with the speed. For advanced readers, their chance to ‘show off’ their vocabulary is there along with the lightening speed of their brains is an advantage. It took one game for them to get the hang of it and then it was all over for me.
The mister and I like to use Bananagrams as a challenge game, for example, whoever looses… does the washing up, takes the rubbish out, does the driving. He is not a master Scrabbler but gets after a couple of games, we are on a pretty even footing.
Bananagrams is going to be in constant rotation during the holidays. It’s portable – all the tiles fit in the cute banana shaped bag. Lots of people can play. You can amend it to suit the players, so only words related to superheros… words related to alcohol. It does not have a complicated set up – no board to navigate, you just need a space be it the table or the floor. It can be played with all ages and each games don’t last a long time so they can be fitted in between cooking, washing up and picking up relatives from the airport, falling asleep in front of the telly and eating leftover turkey. Moreover, Bananagrams is lots of fun! I definitely recommend it.
Banangrams is available from John Lewis, Tesco and other authorised stockists and retails for £11.99
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