Tag Archives: bananagrams

It’s Follow-Up Friday: TableTop Day Edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today, I’m following up on all the International TableTop Day goodness we got up to this week.

The PuzzleNation offices weren’t open on April 5 for the actual TableTop Day, so we celebrated a few days late with an event on Tuesday, and we invited our pals from Penny/Dell Puzzles to join us in all the puzzly game activities we had planned.

Here’s the table of available games for play that day! Everything from one-player brain teasers from ThinkFun (like Rush Hour and the Sudoku-inspired Chocolate Fix) to bigger group games like Apples to Apples and Scattergories, and everything in between! (Including previously reviewed games like Castellan, Pink Hijinks, ROFL!, Fluxx: The Board Game, and Loonacy!)

Here, fellow puzzlers partake in a spirited round of Apples to Apples, the perfect way to blow off a little steam at work after a long morning of puzzlesmithing.

Furiously contested games of Bananagrams and Qwirkle were conducted at either end of our play area, and both were big hits with attendees.

I even had the opportunity to test my mettle against Penny/Dell’s well-traveled Corin the Puzzle Bear in a few rounds of Jenga.

While he beat me handily in two straight games, the tide soon turned against him in round three.

We had a pretty decent turnout overall, and everyone who attended had fun. What more can you ask for, really? (Other than more excuses to play games during work, that is…)

I hope your International TableTop Day was just as enjoyable. As Wil Wheaton says on his YouTube show TableTop, play more games!

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

5 Questions with Rena Nathanson of Bananagrams

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Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, board game creators, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m overjoyed to have Rena Nathanson as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

Rena Nathanson is the CEO (aka the Top Banana) of Bananagrams, a puzzle company built around family-friendly dice and tile games with anagram, pattern matching, and word building elements.

Bananagrams and its fellow puzzle games have won numerous awards and accolades from family groups, and the brand is in good hands with Rena at the helm, continuing to add new products to the Bananagrams puzzle family in the spirit and tradition of Bananagrams patriarch Abe Nathanson.

Rena was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for Rena Nathanson

1.) Bananagrams is a game designed by a family for families. Can you tell us a little bit about how Bananagrams came to be, and how the family dynamic contributes to the company as it stands today?

First and foremost, Bananagrams is a labor of love. As a family we loved playing games, especially word games, but we wanted something fast-paced that the whole family of varying ages could play together. At first we intended to create something just for us, but we showed it to a few friends and family, and everyone said, “You must share this with the world!”

My Dad (who was 75 at the time), myself, and my two kids, Aaron (then age 7) and Ava (then age 11) created the game. My mother, who was in theater and set design, created the pouch… we literally sewed the first few by hand.  My Dad came up with the name, exclaiming: “This anagram game is driving me bananas!,” hence “Bananagrams.”  We created Bananagrams as a family, for families (and friends!) to play together.

[The distinctive Bananagrams pouch, beside a game in progress]

2.) In addition to several English versions, you also have Bananagrams sets designed for other languages. How do you choose which languages get their own edition of Bananagrams, and are there any new editions forthcoming?

Bananagrams is currently available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Norwegian and Hebrew. Swedish and Icelandic are in production. Our criteria for producing a foreign language edition is: do people want it!? If there is sufficient demand, we are happy to produce it.

3.) You’ve got several variations on the letter-tile puzzle, including Appletters, PairsinPears, and Zip-It. Were these all created in-house, or were they pitched to you? How do you know when a game is right for the Bananagrams family?

We created all our games in-house. We developed Appletters and PairsinPears in response to fans looking for a Bananagrams-like game for a younger audience. As for Zip-It, our fans requested something that would capture the magic of Bananagrams, but that could be played in a more compact space.

All our games “travel well,” but Zip-It is the ultimate travel game. It takes up a lot less real estate than Bananagrams, so you can play it on a plane or airplane tray, and the scoring mechanism is on the pouch itself via zippers and numbers.

[A look at the extended Bananagrams puzzle family.]

4.) What’s next for Rena Nathanson and Bananagrams?

My goal is that every school and every household on earth has a set of Bananagrams. Global Domination! Nothing too lofty or anything!  Ha!

But seriously… my father had many aspirations for Bananagrams, and there are many things I would like to see to fruition in honor of him. There is still a long way to go in building and strengthening his legacy.

5.) If you could give the readers, writers, aspiring game designers, and puzzle fans in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

If you have an idea, be passionate about it, don’t take no for an answer and be prepared for some very hard work! Also, know when to ask for help. None of us knows everything, and I wouldn’t be where I am today without all the support and help and advice from various people in all aspects of the industry, which I continue to receive gratefully to this day!

Many thanks to Rena for her time, as well as Bananagrams PR wizards Lesley Singleton and Judee Cohen for their time and assistance. Be sure to keep up on all things Bananagrams by checking out their website and following them on Twitter (@Bananagrams). I can’t wait to see what they come up with next!

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our puzzle apps and iBooks, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

26 letter tiles, endless possibilities…

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On Tuesday, we delved into tile puzzles and games, exploring dominoes, mahjong, and sliding-tile variations. Letter-tile games may not have the centuries of history behind them that those listed above do, but you simply cannot talk about tile games without discussing one of the world’s most popular and recognizable brands: Scrabble.

Scrabble was created in 1938 by an architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, and was adapted from a word game he’d invented previously, known as Lexiko. His second attempt at the game — delightfully titled “Criss-Crosswords” — combined the letter tiles and values of Lexiko with the gameboard and playing style that we’ve all come to know.

A decade later, Butts sold the rights to manufacture the game, and James Brunot renamed it Scrabble. (Some sources also cite that Brunot simplified the rules and shifted the locations of the double- and triple-value squares, but I was unable to verify these claims.)

The game wouldn’t become a household name until years later when it was marketed and sold by Milton-Bradley. Nowadays, of course, the brand is not only known worldwide, but in myriad forms.

Our friends at Hammacher-Schlemmer not only sell an extended version allowing for longer words, but a magnetic version and a giant version, dubbed the World’s Largest (with good reason). Several Penny/Dell puzzles are based on the Scrabble model, and those signature tiles have appeared in game-show form and made an impact in the pop culture lexicon, offering more than a few magical moments to author Joe Hill’s thrilling horror novel NOS4A2.

And then there are the electronic versions. From Wordfeud and Words with Friends to Scrabulous (later known as Lexulous after several lawsuits), Scrabble and other letter-tile games (like Dabble and David L. Hoyt’s puzzle-game Word Winder) are ubiquitous in app stores and all over the Internet.

I was recently introduced to Bookworm, a very addictive puzzle game that deftly mixes the pattern-busting appeal of Candy Crush and other games with the Scrabble aesthetic of assigning point values to various words, encouraging you to find longer and more complex letter chains in order to score more points.

But there are board game variations as well. A particular favorite is Upwords, which is basically Scrabble, except the tiles are designed to allow you to stack them atop each other, spelling new words as you use your opponent’s moves against them. For instance, if your opponent played HENCE, you could place an F atop the H and an I atop the E, and then add other letters to the end, creating the word FENCING.

This additional wrinkle creates opportunities for outside-the-box thinking that Scrabble doesn’t, opportunities easily exploitable for any puzzler who’s adept at Changawords, Word Chains, and other letter-shifting puzzles. (Imagine the tile towers you could build, shifting SPARK to SPARS to SOARS to SOAKS to SOCKS to ROCKS!)

All of these letter-tile games and puzzles encourage anagramming skills, strategy, and a dab hand at quick math — being able to tell if you’ll get more out of a double-word short word or a triple-letter longer word, for instance — but there’s another letter-tile treat that adds a bit of speed to the mix: Bananagrams.

Bananagrams works on the same principle of adaptability as Upwords, encouraging anagramming in order to use up every letter tile in your hand. Launched in 2006 as the brainchild of Abraham Nathanson, it breaks free of the board game aspect of Scrabble and Upwords, allowing you to play anywhere, trying to out-anagram and out-grid-build your opponents in the shortest amount of time possible.

I had the opportunity to chat with Lesley Singleton, the UK PR Manager for Bananagrams, after a YouTube acquaintance posted a picture on her Instagram of a Bananagrams game she’d just played in French:

Lesley told me that, much like Scrabble, there are Bananagrams products for multiple languages (in case any Francophiles out there looking for the best possible chance to exercise their multisyllabic linguistic chops).

Although, as it turns out, they don’t add extra u’s to the UK edition. I made sure to ask, just in case. *laughs*

In the end, I doubt there’s a better vocabulary-building tool on the market today than any of these letter-tile games and puzzles. Whether you’re reaching for a banana-shaped bag full of tiles, a magnetic strip of letters, or the app on your iPhone, you’re sure to learn new words, big and small, the more you play.

(Though be wary of Words with Friends. I don’t know where their word database comes from, but I’ve played words I KNOW are words, and they’ve been rejected. Games like that give me headaches, and make me more and more thankful for go-to guides like the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.)

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our puzzle iBooks and apps, play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!