Bananagrams

Bananagrams is a word tile game invented by Abraham Nathanson together with his wife Rena Nathanson, of Cranston, Rhode Island, and first introduced to the public at the London Toy Fair in January 2006. The game uses a set of 144 lettered tiles packaged in a distinctive banana-shaped fabric pouch. Each player draws a personal hand of tiles from the shared pool and races to arrange them into a connected crossword-style grid of valid words, discarding unwanted tiles back into the pool as new ones are drawn. Play continues until the tile pool is exhausted and one player completes a valid grid using every tile in hand, at which point that player wins the round. Because every player builds and continually rearranges their own grid at the same time, rounds move quickly and reward flexible word-finding over cumulative scoring. Bananagrams can be played competitively by two to eight players or solo as a timed word puzzle.