We recently got the game Bananagrams. I had been looking at it for a while, but never bought it. I’m glad I finally did!

The game is a bunch of tiles, kind of like Scrabble tiles, packed in a case shaped like a banana. You put all the tiles face down in a pile and call that the BUNCH. Each person takes 11-21 tiles depending on how many people are playing (2-8 players can play at once). You turn over your tiles and start playing.

It’s really fun because everyone plays at once. There’s no waiting for your turn. You basically use the tiles to build what looks like a crossword puzzle. To play, you make words until you can’t make any more or you run out of tiles in front of you. If you can’t make any more words, you put one back, face down, in the bunch and say DUMP. Then you take three tiles to replace the one you put back. If you run out of tiles, you say PEEL and every player, including yourself, has to take one tile from the bunch.

You continue playing until all the tiles have been taken from the bunch and either no more words can be made by any player (this seems to be what happens to us most often) or a player uses all their letters. If a player uses the last letter in their pile and there are no more in the bunch, they say BANANAS and are the winner of the game.

It’s really fun and goes really fast. This is a game I wholeheartedly recommend, especially if you like to play Scrabble.