LogFAQs > #937877140

inspiring comment, plus this is a short one, befitting the game!

8. Bananagrams (2006)

Category: Player vs Player
Genres: Real-time, dexterity, word game
Rules complexity (0 to 7): 0
Game length: 5-20 minutes
Experience: 100+ plays with 1-6+ players (2015-2020)
Previous ranks: 5/100 (2016), 11/80 (2018)

Description - There are 144 square tiles, each with a letter printed on them. Each player is dealt a starting set of tiles and, simultaneously, attempts to connect all of the letters in a crossword, like in Scrabble. When any player uses all their tiles, they announce it, and everyone draws a new tile. Once all the tiles are drawn, the first person to use all their tiles is the winner.

Design - There's really not a ton to say about Bananagrams's design. The components are excellent - the tactile feel is huge - and the letter distribution is solid, and the rules... well, they hardly needed anyone to come up with rules - this is really a set of toys. That's honestly what lets the game of it shine through; word games are fun, and real time games are fun.

Ironically, the one area where you do want there to be some more superimposed rules - the mitigation of luck - is where the game comes up short. The game allows you to "dump" a tile with no real restriction, forcing you to pick up three more tiles to do so. Ostensibly this is a penalty, since you now need to fit more letters than another player; however, in practice, that's not much of a penalty at all, if you do get better letters and eventually force someone else to take the Q or J or whatever it was you didn't want. In addition, while whole-game luck should be around the same, the winner isn't whoever peeled the most throughout the game, but rather the person who finishes their final puzzle first - and in a close game, that places an extraordinary amount of weight on the final letter drawn - drawing an A, S, T, or E on the final letter, if the game is anywhere close, pretty much ices the game for you, while drawing a J ensures you lose.

Experience - That said - it's Bananagrams. Games go by lightning-fast and are super-fun at least 80% of the time. This is the very first game I played on that first game night in 2015, meeting the new host and waiting for others to join. I've played it alone a few times, with two players on quieter game nights and in a tournament of friends, with three players as we roomed together for a wedding, with four players to close out game nights, and with five or six players as opener or in-between games on bigger nights. I've gotten that massive play-count because of how damn addictive it is.

Future - I was given Bananagrams on my birthday years back. Fantastic gift. While at the moment, board gaming isn't big on my mind, there's no way Bananagrams won't find its way back to the table many, many times. A game like this feels pretty much impossible to wear out.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness