I am part of the Asmodee UK Blogger Board Game Club run by Playtime PR. Each month 50 bloggers are sent a board game to play and put to the test. This month we were sent the My First Bananagrams game to play.
My First Bananagrams is suitable for children aged 4+ and for 1-4 players. The banana shaped bag contains 80 single tiles, 13 combo-letter tiles and a set of instructions. The game is really simple to play. You tip the tiles out and turn them face down, each player picks 15 tiles at random and when someone shouts “split!” everyone turns their tiles over.
Each player individually races to arrange their letters in their own word grid. At any time during the game you can say “Swap” and put one tile back face down and take a new one. You can rearrange your grid at any time and as many times as you like, there are no limits to the number of times you can swap tiles. The first person to use all of their tiles, or failing that, the most tiles wins.
Each game is quite short, probably between 10 – 15 minutes and it’s probably about the right level for my son. He can find words without too much of a struggle, so it’s still lots of fun and does stretch him a little bit. I think it’s a nice fun game to help build confidence around finding words from a collection of letters.
It’s a lot of fun to play and really great for helping him to think more creatively about words. He started off with three letter words, but was soon confidently finding five letter words. It’s a bit like Scrabble, but with fewer rules and therefore easier to play.
My First Bananagrams is a real winner for us. It’s nice and compact, so you can throw it in your bag and play it anywhere with a flat surface. This will be hugely popular on holiday, I know it!
My First Bananagrams costs around £15.99 and is widely available in toy shops and online.