Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Review: Bananagrams

If Scrabble and Speed had a child, it would be Bananagrams.  Play is quick and frantic as players try to use all their tiles to form their own personal Scrabble board.  The game starts with players taking a set number of tiles based on the number of players.  At the yell of "Split!", players reveal all their tiles and try to form them into a crossword-looking set of words that crisscross each other.  Once a player has used all of their tiles, they say "Peel!" and every player (including that one) must draw another tile.  If a player wants to get rid of a tile they can't play (say an X, a Q, or a Z), they can say "Dump" to put that tile back in the shared pile and draw three more tiles.  Once someone says "Peel!" when there are no more tiles to draw, the game ends.  All other players inspect that player's board.  If there is any mistake, that player loses and play continues until there is a winner.

I have only played this game once, so maybe I just don't quite understand things quite well, but it seems to me that there is no limit to the number of times you can dump tiles, so it seems like you can just repeatedly dump early on to have a much larger batch of tiles to work with.  This game also has the same problem I have with Scrabble and its nonsense words (especially the two letter words like Qi, El, Za, etc.).  But I guess this just means when I beat you with a whole board filled with real words, it will be that much more satisfying.

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