The Best At His Game

Read Charlotte Canelli's column in the Norwood Bulletin and Transcript this week.

Excerpt:

While my children were growing up, holiday tradition always included playing games. As the years passed, Candyland, Sorry, and Go Fish! led to Scattergories, Balderdash, and Hearts. Jenga, a family-favorite tower game of stacking blocks, provided late afternoon fun for various generations. We’ll always miss my elderly aunt Betty who was the master of the steady hand into her late eighties.
Over the years the popularity of board games came and went as kids grew up. Sometimes adult patience wore thin with multiple hours of competitive Monopoly or with the more calculating and troublesome warring game of Risk. As time passed there came teenage angst, family divisions, leavings and comings and less opportunity for the Currier and Ives postcard holiday.

While my children were growing up, holiday tradition always included playing games. As the years passed, Candyland, Sorry, and Go Fish! led to Scattergories, Balderdash, and Hearts. Jenga, a family-favorite tower game of stacking blocks, provided late afternoon fun for various generations. We’ll always miss my elderly aunt Betty who was the master of the steady hand into her late eighties.

Over the years the popularity of board games came and went as kids grew up. Sometimes adult patience wore thin with multiple hours of competitive Monopoly or with the more calculating and troublesome warring game of Risk. As time passed there came teenage angst, family divisions, leavings and comings and less opportunity for the Currier and Ives postcard holiday.

This year my family had more time together in their fourth “blended” year. The rebirth of the gaming tradition found us playing our new family favorite, Bananagrams. If you aren’t familiar with the game, it is something like Scrabble but you play a kind of solitaire with your own portion of the 144 letter tiles. The square plastic tiles are stored in a fabric banana, zippered for storage.I found that a soft Bananagrams game stuffs perfectly in the toe of a Christmas stocking. All of my family members found some version of the game in their stockings this holiday. Those who already had one fruit came across a delicious alternative. New variations are the domino-like game stuffed into a zippered fabric apple or the word pair construction stuffed into a fabric pear.

Players of the original Bananagrams game take a certain number of tiles from the “bunch,” depending on the size of the crowd playing the game. Each player proceeds to make his or her own crossword of intersecting and connecting words.Our family rules include no proper nouns, place names, etc. and foreign language words aren’t acceptable except those commonly used in English (ballet, antique, for example). One of our family members is fluent in Spanish and we are careful to keep him in line. (Spanish and Norwegian editions of the game are available for multilingual families.)

The Bananagrams website (bananagrams-intl.com) informs us that the game was created by a large extended family living on both “sides of the pond” – in the UK and the US. These multiple generations or word-lovers spent summers together on the eastern seaboard of the United States and were on a quest – for a game that included all ages, had few pieces, and was easily-transportable with no large game board.The play on the word “anagram” and the concept of a game named after a comical fruit resulted in the birth of Bananagrams. While the formal definition of “anagram” is a word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word of phrase (such as “Elvis” to “lives”), another definition is simply that of a game in which players form words from a group of randomly picked letters.

The game of Bananagrams begins with the exclaimed word “split!” As the word-forming frenzy speeds up and the individual crosswords become larger, the tiles become fewer and the pressure to find words that use that elusive x or that impossible q rises. When one player has no tiles left he or she shouts “Peel!” and all players are forced to take another tile. When one player has used all his or her tiles and there are no tiles left to go around, that player shouts “Bananas!” and wins the hand. (Players check for unacceptable words. In the event of one, the offending player is a rotten banana and is thrown out, the tiles returned to the table and the game continues.) Bananagrams, interestingly, can be quite simple. Some of the more erudite members of the family can get caught up in trying to make the words too complicated. (“Oratorical” can take up most of your precious vowels and leave very little possibility for that rogue Q or Z.)

My eldest daughter’s beau, a new college professor, has some problem coming up with game-winning shorter words that the rest of us find so easy. He never wins a game and is often left with several disconnected, albeit impressive, words on the table. We’ve teased him mercilessly that all of his education has ruined his game.The morning after Christmas he proved himself the winner. In a quiet game of Bananagrams-for-two and in a well-orchestrated move he failed to make a single connected crossword. He had, however, surreptitiously collected seven little letters he placed before the unsuspecting love of his life: “marry me.” A Bananagrams win that aced them all.

The Morrill Memorial Library has its own offerings of games – both adult and kids play Scrabble on Tuesday evenings, complete with challenges, competitions and champions. We’re thinking of some possibilities of a family game night with additions of more board games for intergenerational ages. Please call us with ideas and interest. Visit our website, www.norwoodlibrary.org or call 781-769-0200 for more information about all of our programs.