Going Bananas

I've been introduced to a new game, and although yet to play it, I've bought two of them. The game is Bananagrams. It is very much like Scrabble, but with no board. Additionally, unlike Scrabble, the object is to use up all of your tiles first (no scores for the letters). Simply speaking, the player who uses all of their tiles first, wins. Another major difference is that players make their OWN puzzles, instead of sharing one community puzzle like in Scrabble. The last major difference is that your puzzle board changes during the game since you can add OR remove tiles, words, etc.

The game promotes itself as a funner, more flexible version of Scrabble. It looks like a lot of fun and I'll be bringing one (the tiles are stored in a yellow banana bag) to NY with me and Marissa on Friday. You can play from one to eight players.

Now, you may ask how this game became known to me and why I would go buy two of them without ever actually playing it...or, you may just not give a darn and have decided to go look at someone elses stupid blog (to you, I say "au revior" and allow me to recommend the Friday News FeedBlog).

For those that decided to stay, I was introduced to Bananagrams by colleagues of mine that I work with in North Carolina. As you may know, I've spent the better part of the last five weeks in North Carolina working on a couple of high profile projects. The story of Bananagrams has come up several times - both as a personal entertainment device (played with family and friends), but also as a team building device (used to build cooperation and respect for how others do things). Understanding how a stupid little game can be so effective in many different areas (and still be fun) got me very interested. I look forward to playing and seeing if it is as fun as everyone says. I'll let you know in my post about the weekend in NY.

As an aside - the game has already spread to some more colleagues in Florida. We'll see if the family in NY picks it up and spreads it, too.

SL