Educational Games Critique 1: Bananagrams

Bananagrams is a popular board game that involves a bag (banana-shaped) with a large number of tiles with letters on them. It was created by American graphic designer Abraham Nathanson when he was 76 because he felt that Scrabble was too slow when he was playing it with his grandchildren. He wanted an anagrams game that could be played faster, and as a result created Bananagrams, which, when I played it, generally lasted around 20 minutes.

To play Bananagrams, you dump out all of the letter tiles from the banana bag, and the core gameplay loop involves each player tiles to start making Scrabble-like crossword arrangements as fast as possible. When they finish with the tiles they grabbed, they say "peel!" and everyone at the table adds a tile to their pile. The first person to use up all their tiles in their crossword construction wins.

I played this past week, and I have played it twice since because I found it to be suprisingly fun and engaging, especially as someone who was pretty bad at it. The first time I played, I didn't say "peel" once, but I still ended up winning because the game is designed in such a way that at any point in the game someone can win by finishing all their tiles, and tiles are drawn by everybody when just one person says "peel." It is indeed a very fast-paced and frantic game aesthetic, and it forces you to redo your work and make risk assessment decisions fast (i.e. when you can "dump" an undesirable letter, but you have to take three letters instead).

More to the point, this critique blog made me think about its educational goals, which I think can be distilled into focusing on spelling, vocabulary, and visualization. It assumes that the player can read and has some vocabulary and knowledge of how to spell a decent amount of words: In order to be better at the game, it helps to develop a larger vocabulary. However, having a larger vocabulary doesn't necessarily make you good at the game. I think that I've found that I'm quite bad at anagram games in general, and it's not really due to a lack of vocabulary (I'd hope an English major has a decent vocabulary), but I think the skill of being able to spot parts of words and common patterns of the spelling units that make up words is a large part of the skillset that it is building.

In terms of a learning mechanism that the game utilizes, I would say that it implements "Goldilocks," or accounting for "the player's prior knowledge and skill level." I think that it's a fast-paced game that doesn't allow for a runaway winner because of previously described mechanic of "peel," and moreover, it is only as hard as how fast or skilled your opponent is.

Overall, I think Bananagrams is excellent as a game and a really promising learning tool for refining concepts and common spellings of words, as well as providing incentives for increasing vocabulary for kids. It's a short, hectic game that keeps you engaged, and it makes you really want to be able to spell long, big words in order to make the optimal crossword structure.