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The original Bananagrams come in a banana-shaped pouch and it’s the first in the bunch (pun intended) of the series of games. In this game, players race against each other to make Scrabble-type grids of words and use all their letter tiles. There’s no taking turns, it’s a free-for-all game to beat your opponents. Bananagrams is super fun, challenging, compact, and helps older children and adults alike build their vocabulary and use their brains while enjoying themselves. This game is not really designed for younger children on a competitive level, but my 5 year old loves making words with the tiles on his own.
Appletters, packed in an apple pouch, is a more strategic game and slightly easier than Bananagrams because it offers three difficulty levels of play. The object of this game is to build a “snake” of words that span across the entire table. When it’s your turn, you add to the beginning or the end of the snake by using the letter there as the first or last letter of your new word. There are also harder variations called Applescore and Apple Turnover, which are fun for older kids and adults. My kids love Appletters! They love making the snake and even 5 year old Quinn can make simple words with the Appletters tiles.
Last but not least is Pairs in Pears, my personal favorite along with Zip-It (previous review). Packed in a pear this game has lettered tiles that are stylized with solids, stripes, outlines, and dots and the object is to make a crossword-style grids of only two words using only tiles of the same pattern. Everyone works at the same time to beat their opponents and to make a predetermined number of word pairs. It is extremely fun and is a great way for children to develop cognitive skills and develop memory along with learning the alphabet, pattern recognition, word construction, and much more. We all love this game and love to team up in adult/child teams and try to outplay the others.
All the Bananagrams games are well-made, compact and portable, and help children and adults alike to utilize their brains unlike many other equally entertaining, but mindless, games. We love to take our Bananagrams games to restaurants to keep the children entertained and engaged while we wait, which has proven most helpful in many situations. You can purchase these and all Bananagrams games on their website, www.bananagrams.com, and find out where to purchase them at retailers nationwide. They retail for approximately $15.99 each and can be purchased with Free Shipping on Amazon.com. Their site also features video demonstrations of the games that give you a much better feel for the games than my written review can.
Thank you to Bananagrams for providing complimentary product samples for us to base this review upon and for providing an additional product for our contest prize.
Good luck in the drawing!