Ready for some word play?
BENGALURU: Most of the board games I talk about in this column aren’t all that easy to acquire in India, either for reasons of availability or of price. That, I assure you, is more a reflection of the industry’s status in the country than any sort of sadism on my part. Today, however, we’re going to take a look at a game that’s not expensive, that’s easily available and is a whole lot of fun in a small package.
Bananagrams is a word game where players are arranging tiles with letters on them to form words, and that’s as far as I can go before the elephant in the room makes itself apparent — yes, this does sound a lot like Scrabble. However, for reasons I will now proceed to explain, it is certainly not Scrabble and in fact might even appeal to people who hate Scrabble with a passion.
–Yes, you are making words using tiles with alphabets on them but there are no points to be found on those tiles or, indeed, in this game. Points are not how you win Bananagrams.
– Yes, those words do have to intersect like a crossword or...you know, Scrabble, but you aren’t playing on a communal board — instead, you’re creating a grid of connected words in front of yourself. This also means that you have the flexibility to pull sections of your grid apart and rearrange them whenever you like to accommodate new tiles or opportunities that might’ve cropped up.
- And finally, the third and most important distinguishing feature that sets this game apart from Scrabble — there are no turns, everybody’s playing at the exact same time.
At the beginning of the game, each player will take a certain number (depending on the number of players) of the 144 tiles the game comes with, and will keep them face down in front of themselves. As soon as someone yells ‘Split!’, everybody flips their letters over and starts making words. Your short-term goal in Bananagrams is to utilise all the letters in your possession in your word tableau because, as soon as anybody does so, they must then shout ‘Peel!’ and all players have to then take one more tile from the pool of remaining tiles in the centre.
What if you’re stuck with a letter you absolutely cannot use, though? Well, you can dump it — placing it back in the pool face down — and take three tiles in exchange. When there are fewer tiles in the pool than the number of players, the first player to use all their tiles is supposed to bellow ‘Bananas!!!’ (no really, with three exclamation marks; I copied that from the rulebook!) and they win the game...if all of their words are valid. If any of them aren’t, that player is eliminated from the game and everybody else resumes playing. If it isn’t already obvious, Bananagrams is a barrel of laughs.
The chaos of trying to come up with words despite forgetting large swathes of the English language due to stress is balanced out by those times when you’re praying that somebody else calls ‘Peel!’ so that you might be able to draw the vowel you need to make everything else fall into place. The pressure of having to do all this in real-time ensures that games don’t come down to who knows the most obscure two-letter words in the English language, and that’s why even Scrabble-skeptics might find joy here. It’s an utterly brilliant game, and everybody should own a copy. Heading into a holiday season, there’s no better time to give Bananagrams a try.
What’s New?
Camel Up
I’ve taught this one to a couple of groups recently, and there were subsequent howls of laughter and/or rage with some frequency. A hilarious game about racing camels and the folly of trying to place bets on them, this is a crowd-pleaser if ever there was one.
Rise of Augustus
The endless wave of new releases/announcements has eased up a bit, so it’s time to celebrate some older games. Rise of Augustus kicks things off, and this accessible bingo-style tactical game has won over quite a few people lately.
Nusfjord
Finally, we end with a rather more sober game. Uwe Rosenberg is hailed more for games like Agricola and Feast for Odin, but Nusfjord (which came out a couple of years ago to comparatively less acclaim) has been quietly stellar every single time I’ve played it.
Arjun Sukumaran