Bananagrams Jumbo

By children toys on January 11th, 2010

Bananagrams Jumbo Review

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Bananagrams is a blast. It’s similar to Scrabble, but everyone works their own board, so that no one is preparing to use all their tiles to make an amazing word just to have someone else come along and mess it up with “za”.

There is still plenty of competition, as everyone races to complete their own board before everyone else. There’s the moment of triumph as you’re the first one to finish and you yell “Bananas!”, and then the crushing moment when someone looks over your board and realizes you misspelled a word.

The standard game is a lot of fun, but with several people we find it easier to play the “Banana Smoothie” version. There’s also a version which allows for timed play and a solitaire version, and even a game to play in a restaurant while waiting for service. (It’s a very portable banana, and all you need is a flat surface.)

We picked up a double banana because now we’ve got too many people to play with just one banana. (Wait, that doesn’t sound quite right.) The double version has two sets of tiles, so you can take out one set if you’ve only got a few people. We’ve marked one of the two sets with nail polish so that when we play with both, we can split (no pun intended) them back up again when we’re done.