Bananagrams!

I'd heard Pam talk about this game before but never had an opportunity to try it out until tonight! It's a bit like Scrabble, a bit like Boggle. It uses corny terms like "split" and "peel" for different moves in the game. You can play with two or eight like we did later in the evening.

Each player draws a specified number of tiles (determined by how many are playing). These remain face down on the playing area until the game begins. Then it's a race to turn the letters into words faster than your opponent. You do NOT play on each others' words. Instead you each have your own work space and when you use all your tiles you yell "peel" and you each draw a tile. Placing ONE tile is much easier than however many you might have remaining so the "peel" word gets hollered a lot once things get rolling. Eventually there are no more tiles in the pot and whoever is able to play her last tile correctly and have no more left to draw, wins!

We played this a few times at her house on whim. Decided to go out for pizza at Rhombus guys on a whim. Thought about playing bananagrams while we waited for our pizza but they were fast and we barely got started before we had to put it all away.

After our meal, we stopped at Marci's to drop off a Tupperware bowl and stopped at Anna's to taste her latest culinary treat -- a kind of mango, tomato, bean salad. Yum.

Before we knew it, both Pam and I had set aside our plans for an evening walk and were sucked into some bananagrams family fun at Marci and Dave's and we had Dave, Marci, Marci's mom and all the kids playing too. Too fun.

If you love Scrabble and scoring lots of points you might not like this game dedicated to word play and speed, but you might! It's very portable and sort of funny and everyone seemed to enjoy it and wanted to keep playing it long after bedtime!