It’s a Fruity Word Game

“Split!”

“Peel!”

“Dump…”

“Bananas!”

These are the words you’re going to hear most during a fast-paced word game my family has recently discovered. What’s it called?
Bananagrams!

For a game that only cost me $14.95 at my FLGS,¹ it is surprisingly well made. The 144 tiles are of a faux ivory, much like dominos. They feel good in your hands, and come in a cloth sack in the shape of, you guessed it, a banana.

To play the game, you simply put the tiles face down in the middle of the table. This is known as the Bunch. Then, each player draws out a number of tiles and places them in front of him. The number of tiles is based on the number of players. The fewer the players, the more tiles you’re going to draw to start the game.² The game supports play from 2 – 8 players.

Once tiles are drawn, someone yells, “Split!” And you’re off. Tiles are flipped face up and everyone begins trying to build a crossword puzzle of interconnecting words in front of them, using all the letters they drew. Also, the words you build aren’t set in stone, you can re-arrange and and re-build your words as often as you need to.

When you’ve created words using ALL of your original tiles, you yell, “Peel!” At his point, you and every other player MUST draw a tile from the Bunch in the middle. Place the tile on a word if you can or begin rearranging all over. Once it’s used, yell, “Peel!” again, draw another tile, and keep going. I found this to be very frustrating when someone else makes me draw another tile, just when I thought I was done.

If you have a letter that you just can’t find a place for, you have the option of yelling, “Dump!”³ turn the letter over and shove it back to the middle of the table, and in turn you get to draw three more tiles. This move, however, does not affect the other players.

I’ve found it actually beneficial to dump a couple of times in a row, just to get a few more letter and, thus, options, to build faster. This also has the side-effect of shorting the game, actually, as you quickly cause the Bunch to decrease in tiles.

Play continues until there are fewer tiles in the middle of the table than players of the game. Once that happens, when you’ve used up all your letters, you yell “Bananas!”

At this point, play will pause as everyone checks over your words. If you misspelled or made up a word, you’re the “Rotten Banana.” Your tiles are flipped over, shoved back into the middle of the table, and play resumes with you sitting out and forever⁴ the loser.

If, however, all your words are spelled correctly, you win!

This is both an extremely fun, fast and at times frustrating game. The more we played, though, the more I would see words jumping out at me as I flipped over letters. My wife showed off a bit by spelling ‘ingratitude’ as her first word, building off from there, during one of the games.

The rules say that a single round of this can last as little as 5 minutes, though I’m not sure how true that is. Honestly, I wasn’t keeping track of time, so it could very well have been that close for one of our rounds, though it felt like forever as I tried to find a word to spell with the Q, got frustrated, yelled “Dump!” to trade it in for three others, and found another Q in the stack I drew. Yes, such is the way of the game.

Also in the rules are other variations to play to either make it less hectic, or to play in a café, or even as a solitaire game.

The name came from the saying “The anagram game that will drive you bananas!” – hence BANANAGRAMS!!⁵

My gaggle loves Bananagrams and highly recommends it to anyone looking for a fun, fast-paced, educational game.

Enjoy! And keep gaming!

1. Again, Underhill’s Games. [↩]
2. 21 being the most you’re going to draw for a 2-4 player game. [↩]
3. Though this word I’ve found isn’t yelled so much as growled. [↩]
4. at least until the end of the game [↩]
5. From the Bananagrams website. [↩]

Related posts:

1. A Vonderful Goot Game!
2. The Frugal Geek: Games
3. Episode 0029: Storygaming

1. 

   Nycteris says:

   February 3, 2010 at 9:47 am

   Oh! I saw this game for sale in the craft store, of all places. The commercial for it (playing continuously on a TV by the display) is horrible. But the game sounds fun! Thanks for the review!
2. 

   Gaston says:

   February 5, 2010 at 12:34 am

   Interestingly, I recently discovered that you can find this as an electronic game on Facebook. Yes, folks, a Facebook app. And it’s actually enjoyable, with both solo and multi-player options. Worth a look-see.