Review

BANANAGRAMS Party Review

October 8, 2016

To celebrate 10 years of BANANAGRAMS, a new version of the game called, BANANAGRAMS Party, has been launched.

My wife and I have been playing this game, but our four year old twins like to ‘play’ along too. It’s actually great for their letter recognition skills!

The original BANANAGRAMS game has sold more than 7 million copies in 30+ countries globally since launching in 2006. It’s a much loved game that has an army of fans including the cast of ITV’s Downton Abbey, Dame Judi Dench, Scarlett Johansson and many more!

There are 14 chaos-inducing party power tiles in the new BANANAGRAMS Party game. You’ve got The Re-Gifter, The Thief, Switcheroo, Pouch Head and many more!

Each tile gives the receiving player the power to unleash a special action on the opponent of their choice! They could make them play without using their thumbs or even force them to do a lap around the table!
The aim of the game is for players to use all their letter tiles and complete their own word grids.

Setting up the game is pretty simple. As mentioned above there are 14 party tiles with icons. You won’t need these just yet, so you can set them aside.

First up, place all of the 144 letter tiles face down in the middle of the table. These form the BUNCH. Each player now starts taking their tiles from the BUNCH.

You’ll need to grab your 14 party tiles and make sure each player understands the power of each one, before adding the party tiles face down to the BUNCH. Make sure you mix them all up! You don’t need to use all of the party tiles if you don’t want too, but we think it’s more fun if you do!

To start the game any player needs to call out “SPLIT!” Everyone then turns over their tiles and races to arrange them in their own connecting, intersecting word grid.

The thing that I like most about this game is that there’s no turn taking. Everyone plays simultaneously and independently.

Words can be made horizontally or vertically so that they read left to right or top to bottom and you can rearrange your grid as often as you like.

Whenever a player uses the last of their letters, that person calls out “PEEL!” Everyone—including the one saying “PEEL”—now takes another tile from the BUNCH to fit into their grid. If you ever get stuck with a tricky letter you can say “DUMP” and put it back, face down, in the BUNCH. However, be warned! If you do this you must take three more tiles in exchange! You can ‘DUMP’ as many times as you like!

There are a few important things to note when playing. When you draw a party tile from the BUNCH, you must use it immediately.

If the BUNCH has fewer tiles than there are players when you put the last letter in your grid, you don’t say “PEEL”, you say “BANANAS!”

This when other players now inspect your word grid. If it contains a misspelled word, proper noun, abbreviation or other unacceptable word, the others call out “ROTTEN BANANA!” and you’re out of the game!

ALL of a Rotten Banana’s letters and party tiles are returned to the BUNCH face down. Play now continues for everyone else until the BUNCH again depletes, and someone else calls out “BANANAS!” When someone says “BANANAS!”, and has an acceptable grid, they become TOP BANANA, and win!

It took a few games for my wife and I to get to grips with the gameplay, but now that we fully understand, it’s a pretty addictive game! Aimed at children over 10, you can have 2-8 people at a time.