Bananagrams Game Review- A Fun Word Game!

The Bananagrams Race to the Finish
Playing Bananagrams is pretty simple. Each person gets a certain amount of letters that can vary depending on how many people are playing and the remaining letters go face down in the "bunch". With your letters, you make words that connect to one other like you would do in Scrabble. However, you are all playing on your own at the same time racing against each other. So, nobody else can play on your words and you can't play on anybody else's words.

The Game Gets a Little Crazy with "Peeling"
In the Bananagrams instructions you will see different words you call out like "Peel" when you have used all your letters and that will signal to everyone else that they need to pick up a letter. Sometimes it can get a little crazy when someone keeps using all their letters and yells "Peel" a lot! You can also exchange a letter and say "Dump" for one that isn't working for you but you will have to grab 3 letters from the "bunch" so I try to do that sparingly.

Winning Bananagrams and Getting Kicked Out of The Game!
The winner is the one who uses all their letters first! But there's a catch--people can challenge your words and look them up in a dictionary. If the challenged word is not in the dictionary, then you will automatically lose and your tiles will go back in the bunch while everyone else keeps going and you sit out. That has happened to me and I learned my lesson and didn't play any words I wasn't SURE were in the dictionary.

Bananagrams was an impulse buy for me--I just thought the banana container with a zipper was cute so I wanted to try the game. I know, don't always judge a book by it's cover but in this case Bananagrams lives up to its fun packaging.

Bananagrams is a lot of fun with 4 people. The games go by pretty fast UNLESS someone is challenged and has to put their letters back in the bunch.... and then another person is challenged and their letters have to go back in the bunch, which leaves two people battling it out at the end.

Since the games go by pretty quickly we usually play 5 or more Bananagrams games in a row depending on how much time we have and declare the winner to be the one who wins the most games.

Bananagrams is also great because you can't get stuck. When you can't find a place to go, you can rearrange your letters.

When my family gets together, they have asked if I brought Bananagrams with me, so I know they must like it as much as I do! Luckily, Bananagrams is very portable and not in a huge box like some games are so it's so easy to take with you anywhere!

Bananagrams Can Be Played in More Than One Way
The Bananagrams instructions encourage trying different variations of the game and give you some suggestions. The one suggestion we took was "Best of" where we play 5 games and the winner is the one who wins the most. The other suggestions look good too and the one I think we may want to try next is the one where no 2 letter words are allowed. I believe this will make the game more challenging because 2 letter words can be too easy to make sometimes!

I also want to try the solo Bananagrams suggestion sometime for practice.