Rating:

A couple of things you should know: this item is two individual Bananagrams games, not a single and a double or two doubles. And while it’s a great game for kids, the tiles are small (roughly the same size as Scrabble tiles,) so if you’ve got very young kids who like to put things in their mouths, this could be a choking hazard and it’s not the game for them. Yet.

Now about the game itself. We bought a double Banana for our weekly game, because we’ve had so much fun with it that we’ve picked up too many people for one Banana. This is my review for Bananagrams Jumbo:

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 jumbo 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.