A hard-fought match between my father and me.
The folks at Blue Highway Games sold me a new game recently, and now that I've conducted thorough play-testing aboard Two Lucky Fish, I give it an enthusiastic thumbs-up!
The game is called Bananagrams, and despite what you may think, it's not Scrabble. The Bananagrams website is very informative, with complete instructions and other information that should help you decide if it's the type of game your crew will enjoy.
I'll describe the game in a bit more detail below, but here's why I think it's an especially good boat game, in particular:
The game consists of plastic letter tiles and a zippered fabric pouch in which to store them. No cardboard game board or wooden pieces that could deteriorate in the unpredictable heat and humidity typical of most boat cabins.
The soft pouch is easy to store, fitting into in any little nook you might have available. All you really need is a flat surface on which to play.
By the way, we determined that it's better NOT to use a non-skid table covering for Bananagrams: Sometimes you need to slide whole crossword sections around into new configurations, and the non-skid becomes more frustrating than helpful.
Which reminds me"¦I promised to explain how the game works and why it's not Scrabble..
In a nutshell, each player creates their own individual crossword-style arrangement of words using the letters they've drawn, and they can change words around as often as they like. There are no turns"¦everybody plays simultaneously. Everybody starts with the same number of tiles, and when any player has successfully incorporated all their tiles into their crossword, everybody must draw an additional tile.
Unlike Scrabble, Bananagrams doesn't reward those with a strong vocabulary of bizarre words. Not to the same degree, anyway. You can compete using totally conventional, everyday words. As in Scrabble, letters such as Q, Z, and X can be especially tough to use, but since you can move the letters you've already used around, it's a lot easier to figure out a way to make "quiz" or "oxen" by cannibalizing words you've already made and reworking the leftovers into different words.
In a way, the game is a kind of race: the winner is the first person to use all their letters (once the letter pile in the middle is exhausted). In the picture above, one of us finished first and the other followed a few seconds later. We weren't too concerned with who won"¦the satisfaction comes from performing the pattern recognition and puzzle-solving tasks, and the enjoyment from doing so in a social setting, helping (or distracting) one another along the way.
Bananagrams can be played by two to six players, and even young readers can participate. You might create special rules for younger players; for instance, we let our youngest daughter use proper names (which are normally forbidden) and encourage her to fabricate long compound words (such as "Arwen's big head", which ends up ARWENSBIGHEAD on the table). With one long word "across", she can make lots of the small words she knows "down". We help her out when we're not feeling too overwhelmed with our own collection of unused letters! It might be difficult for her to actually win the game, but she gets to participate, and she's learning something about words and letters along the way.
Over the summer, I'm going to try to identify some other games well-suited to boating. But I've got a hunch that Bananagrams is going to be a tough act to follow!
