Reinventing Bananagrams

Rosalie Garlow, Laura Simpson, & Shula Ponet

Playtest 1 - Bananagrams

• Tiles face down in the middle of players ("BUNCH")  • 21 letters per player

 • Connect and intersect letters (from your own tiles) to form words

o horizontal or verticalo left to right or top to bottomo rearrange words as often as desiredo no turns; play independently and simultaneously

 • When a player finishes his/her letters, s/he says "PEEL" and everyone must

take 1 tile from the bunch • At any time a player can exchange a letter by putting it back into the center

and taking three in return. They must say "DUMP"  • Play continues until there are fewer tiles in the bunch than there are players.

The first player to finish his/her letters shouts "BANANAS" and wins game

Playtest 1 - Results

• Aesthetics: Challenge, Expression, Submission

 • Mechanics: letter tiles, peel, dump • Dynamics: work independently,

create your own interconnected words, risk rearranging your letters and beginning again?

 

• The player who has been in the lead for the duration of the game can easily lose the game

• Easy to learn • With fewer players,

game can go on for a bit too long

Playtest 2 - One Rule Change

• New Rule: When someone says "peel" all players must pick up 3 new tiles, rather than just 1

• Results:o Speeds game up a bito When stuck, 3 new letters can help you more than just 1o Towards end, makes game play more difficult, though still

winnable

Playtest 3- Mechanic Change

• New Mechanic: The only valid words are two, four or six letters long.

• Results:o Adds a level of difficulty to the game.o Eliminated many easy, three letter wordso Towards end, the game had the possibility of being

unwinnable.o The Mechanic was rejected.

• Modified Mechanic: Words could be built in right to left and down to up directions as well as left to right and up to down.

Playtest 4 - Mechanic Change 2

• Results:o Made the players think laterally.o Having more options made

players more creative with word placement.

o Made the game easier in the aspect of building the crossword. 

o Added some difficulty for players used to the old rules.

Playtest 5- Sealed Envelope

Modified Mechanic:  VERB: Tempting- Option to tempt other players in "single letter" trades. One trade per peel round. SOCIAL ISSUE: Colonialism- When a player has finished using all their pieces, prompting a "peel" that player has the option of taking 3 new pieces from the remaining pile OR to take 3 pieces from another opponents current play. Pieces must be taken from the same word.

VALUE: Liberty/Autonomy- First person to have a "peel" is free from colonalism. No one can take pieces from their current words. 

Playtest 5- Results

Round 5 Conclusions:

-Colonialism seems like a good option, but no players made use of it. -Players were too focused on their own words to make use of Colonialism.

-We tried to tempt people with our letters, but no trades were made.

-The rule of autonomy creates more competition - race to first peel.

-We were all nice too nice (and too focused on our independent play) to steal (Colonialism) but we think people would have fun with it!