PAX, the Omegathon, and novelty in video games

I love books and documentaries that examine quirky subcultures. The book Word Freak provides a fascinating look inside the world of tournament Scrabble. Murderball was a great film about the players of wheelchair rugby. My favorite quirky documentary though is The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters which dramatizes the competition between two players for the high score in the classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

I've just found an amazing article online called PAX Primer which is the perfect introduction to the quirky subculture that is the Penny Arcade Expo. It covers the origins of the Expo (in case you ever wanted to know how a web comic can spawn a convention dedicated to video games and board games), the growth of video games, and their transition from fringe to mainstream culture.

Earlier this year, I posted about PAX because Bananagrams was an event in the PAX East Omegathon. It turns out that the Omegathon organizers decided to feature Bananagrams in the west coast PAX Omegathon as well. The article says that in the convention program, Bananagrams is described as "like Scrabble, only not boring and for old people".

It later goes on to discuss a few computer games which I might opine are "like video games, only not boring and for old people". The new wave of computer games does not suck you into endless repetition.

Portal is a game where you solve puzzles by shooting two holes on different walls, ceilings, or other surfaces in your environment. These "portals" are connected (as if by a wormhole), so whatever goes in one, comes out the other, with the same momentum. I recently started playing this game and can not get enough of it.

Braid is an even stranger game in which the player gets to control the flow of time. The selling points of the game are listed on the game's web site:

• Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler.
• Braid treats your time and attention as precious.
• Braid does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience.

Braid's programmer, Jonathan Blow, self-financed the game as he coded it over three years as a statement about how video games could and should be different.

Braid does not look like any other computer game. The artwork is great. It was done by the artist behind the surreal web comic A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. Braid also does not sound like any other computer game. Its atmospheric music helped to win me over.

With the success of these games, even more ambitious games are in the works, on topics such as non-Euclidean geometry (Antichamber) and four-dimensional space (Miegakure).


In a world where video games have become mainstream, it makes sense for a niche to develop for games that emphasize originality. I am glad that quirky subcultures exist to sustain this kind of bold experimentation.

August 2011 Bananagrams events

A couple of notable Bananagrams-related events are scheduled to take place next month.

1) Bananagrams is sponsoring the August 13th instance of WaterFire, a spectacular event that takes place along the river in Providence, Rhode Island. One hundred fires blaze along two-thirds of a mile of the river, illuminating the art and performances that accompany the festivities. WaterFire happens several times each summer, but on August 13th, there will be special Bananagrams-related events.

waterfire.org/bananas is the official page for the Bananaganza. Also available is a schedule for the evening's events.

Providence is home to Brown University and a strong arts scene. A graduate of Brown, Barnaby Evans, created the WaterFire concept and has been running it since 1994. Evans was a friend of Abe Nathanson (the inventor of Bananagrams) and wrote a tribute to Abe.

It's very cool that Bananagrams is sponsoring this event. The Bananagrams components of the evening have not yet been revealed. I think they're going to be surprises, but this idea has been cooking for over a year, so I expect it will be a great event. If you are in the area, I recommend checking it out.

Also, if you happen to go to Providence, keep an eye out for the Bananagrams headquarters sign while driving around:

(This photo was sent in by a personal acquaintance and Bananagrams fan. In case you were wondering, that is not a sign for the "Bananagrams Archives Gallery". I believe the "Archives Gallery" is a separate business in the same building.)


2) On August 14th, large-scale Bananagrams will be played in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. They are going to use 1-foot square tiles made of Masonite (a type of processed wood, sometimes used for house siding and interior doors). The game will look something like this:

Further details on the event are here.


I suppose very large-scale Bananagrams would be played by moving around human-sized tiles, like "human chess" (those games of chess where people act as the chess pieces) except it would be much faster. Played with a full set of tiles, you'd need 144 people. Watching people run around and try to figure out where to stand to form words while other players are peeling off the bunch would be awesome. Human Bananagrams is really something that has to be played.

Hebrew Bananagrams

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As posted in the (now dearly departed) Bananagrammer forum, the Hebrew version of Bananagrams is now out.
The Israeli distributor has a web site dedicated to this version of the game, http://www.bananagrams.co.il which is in Hebrew. There is also an English translation of the site.

If there were an award for the language that Bananagrams would play most differently in, Hebrew would be a contender. Hebrew doesn't have an alphabet; it has an abjad - an alphabet without vowels. In written Hebrew, vowels may optionally be indicated by a system of diacritic marks placed above or below the consonants. In the image above, the tiles are all Hebrew consonants. My suspicion is that this will make Bananagrams matches in Hebrew markedly faster than in other languages.

UPDATE: This article gives more information on how the Hebrew translation of Bananagrams came about:

For the Israeli version, the Dalfens [the family that owns and runs the Israeli distributor] did not only translate the game’s instructions and special terms − such as “split,” dump,” and “peel” − but also consulted a Hebrew linguist regarding the frequency of each letter. [...] the allocation of letters would vary depending on whether Biblical or Modern Hebrew is used, according to the linguist. The Dalfens opted to allocate letters corresponding to the spoken language.

Good three-letter words for Bananagrams, sorted by rareness

When playing Bananagrams, 2-letter words are great for rapidly adding letters to a grid, like when you are running off a string of "PEEL"s, but it's hard to make an entire grid out of 2-letter words. In this post, I'm going to examine some of the 3-letter words and show you which are most commonly used and which you might want to add to your active vocabulary.

First, consider this list of some 3-letter words you can make with the letter V:

eve, ivy, ova, rev, van, vat, veg, vet, vex, via, vie, vim, vow

We don't have a good set of data of what words are most commonly used in playing Bananagrams, and Scrabble word choice would likely be a poor substitute since players' priorities in Scrabble are very different than in Bananagrams. WordSquared offers a good compromise: its gameplay shares score maximization with Scrabble, but also includes the rapid score-aloof word-building (such as when evading or outflanking opponents) that epitomizes Bananagrams.

If you sort the above V words by word count (as obtained from WordSquared word pages), you get

van, eve, vet, vat, vie, via, vex, rev, vow, ivy, ova, veg, vim

But sorting by raw word count is not the most useful ordering since the Scrabble tile distribution is going to skew the results. There are lots of As, Es, Ns, and Ts, so of course VAN, EVE, VET, and VAT will be popular words. I wanted to subtract out this bias to see what words would be most and least used if all letters were equally likely to be available. I accomplished this by just dividing each word count by the number of times that each of its letters occurs in a standard Scrabble tile set [which corresponded to the Word² distribution until the recent Word² redesign, which fortunately happened after I finished this post]. (For example, the word VAN had been used in WordSquared 24198 times (over about 2 months). In a 100-tile Scrabble set, there are 2 Vs, 9 As, and 6 Ns, so I divided 24198 by 2 and by 9 and by 6 to get a normalized count of 224.1.) Sorting the words by the normalized word count gives:

vex, vow, ivy, van, vat, vet, vim, vie, rev, eve, veg, via, ova

When people have a V, they are more likely to make VEX than any other three-letter V word. (In this case, 70% more likely than even the closest word (VOW).) On the other end, VIA is used fairly often in terms of raw word counts, but sparingly when considering how often it could be made.

Below are more word lists, all sorted by this effective word usage rate, starting from the most common words and ending with the most neglected:

3-letter words that contain the hardest letters, sorted from common to rare:

J words:
joy, jug, job, jam, jaw, jog, jay, jab, jig, jar, jet, jot, jut, jag, jib

K words:
key, kid, sky, kit, yak, kin, keg, wok, ink, ark, ask, oak, irk, ski, ken, ilk, koi, uke, eke, ska, auk

V words:
vex, vow, ivy, van, vat, vet, vim, vie, rev, eve, veg, via, ova

X words:
box, fox, wax, fix, mix, vex, fax, hex, tax, pox, six, sex, tux, lax, axe, lox, sax

Z words:
zip, zit, zoo, zap, zig, zag, fez


3-letter words that begin with vowels, sorted from common to rare:

Words that begin with A:
axe, ark, ask, any, awe, ace, arc, and, age, aim, arm, act, ash, ape, ago, ant, aye, art, air, all, aft, aid, ate, add, are, ail, ale, ado, apt, ass, asp

Words that begin with E:
elk, egg, elf, eve, eye, end, ego, elm, emu, ewe, eat, ebb, ear, eel, eke, era, eon, ere, eta

Words that begin with I:
ivy, ink, icy, ice, irk, ilk, ill, imp, inn, ire, its, ion

Words that begin with O:
off, owl, orb, oak, own, oil, old, owe, ova, one, oft, out, orc, our, odd, ode, oaf, opt, oat, oar, obi

Words that begin with U:
use, urn, ump, uke

Words that begin with Y:
you, yak, yam, yes, yet, yew, yap, yip, yin, yep, yon, yea


3-letter words that end with vowels, sorted from common to rare:

Words that end in A:
via, ova, yea, boa, pea, tea, bra, sea, spa, ska, era, goa, baa, eta

Words that end in E:
axe, the, bye, cue, ice, hue, she, pie, vie, eve, ace, awe, foe, eye, age, dye, bee, owe, hoe, rye, due, ape, woe, die, sue, aye, toe, tie, ewe, ore, rue, use, ate, lye, are, doe, ale, ode, pee, wee, see, ire, fie, uke, tee, eke, lee, ere

Words that end in I:
chi, ski, koi, phi, poi, obi, psi

Words that end in O:
zoo, who, ego, ago, boo, goo, moo, two, woo, too, coo, ado, pro, loo, bro, fro, rho, tao

Words that end in U:
you, flu, emu, gnu, tau

Words that end in Y:
joy, jay, why, key, guy, boy, buy, coy, way, toy, fly, cry, day, gay, sky, hay, bay, ivy, pay, shy, may, soy, hey, fry, lay, dry, say, ray, try, ply, sly, spy, icy, pry, nay, thy, fey, any, sty, ley


It's interesting to look at how different words fare. Auks and asps are nearly forgotten, but foxes and owls are quite popular. Greek letters (eta, phi, psi, rho, tau) and abbreviations for musical instruments (sax, uke) and for formal wear (tux) do not see much grid time. I am glad to see that everybody loves joy.

If you want to learn useful new words to add to your active Bananagrams vocabulary, the ends of those lists might be a good place to start.

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Further reading:

• What to do when you have too many vowels
• Innergrams and what they can tell us about word favoritism
  - a different look at words that might be in your word blind spot

Innergrams and what they can tell us about word favoritism

So I was playing Word², and I had a rack of A R T T U _ _ and a desire to build down from the word LEND. Reflexively, I spelled DART and was about to move on when I paused and asked myself "Why didn't I make DRAT?". DRAT is a perfectly fine word, and unlike DART, I don't recall ever playing it before. After building off the end of LEND, I was planning to build another word off the end of DART to extend my slaloming, weaving string of words off toward the horizon. This style of wordcrafting is not atypical, so many people must have previously encountered a similar choice between two words that start and end with the same letters. I began to wonder how they chose.

Fortunately WordSquared has a new feature that allowed me to find out. By clicking on a word on the board, you can pull up a pop-up box containing a little information about the word including definitions, who has recently played the word, and how many times it has been played (since statistics have been kept... about a month ago as of late-March).

DART had been played 4789 times.

DRAT had been played 1723 times.

So it was not just me.

I decided to study this a little more. I compiled a long list of anagrams that share the same first and last letters (e.g., FORTH and FROTH, SEAHORSE and SEASHORE). Since it is only the inner letters that are scrambled, I decided to call them "innergrams".

The table below shows the resulting innergram pairs with each word's respective word count (as taken from Word² statistics pages like this one.) The words are sorted so the more frequently used one is always in the first column. The fifth column shows the ratio of the two word counts.

Since I wanted to identify data that was not strong enough to draw conclusions from, I used formal hypothesis testing. The chi-square goodness of fit test I used is described in detail here. The essence of it is that the more data you have and the farther the ratio of word counts is from 1, the stronger the evidence is that one word is preferentially being used over the other. The chi-square parameter (in column 6) measures how strong this evidence is. I've sorted the table by increasing evidence strength.

Admittedly, there are lots of situations where one of these words would be favored over another for in-game reasons (like, CRAVE was already on the board and CRAVEN was made by just adding an N, or maybe a triple-letter score square made CAVERN a higher scoring choice). Averaged over many instances, some of these effects should cancel out.

The first three rows have such a small chi-square value that it's pretty certain that people are not (on average) favoring one of these words over another. (Maybe for every person who makes CRAVEN by adding an N to CRAVE, there is someone else making CAVERN by adding an N to CAVER.) The gray rows are weakly supported. The rest of the rows have a big enough chi-square parameter that we can say with greater than 95% certainty that Word² players favor the first word over the second word. In the last column of the table, I suggest reasons why.



Essentially, this is a listing of possible word blind spots. DART is a far more popular choice than DRAT, and unlike many of the examples on this list, this asymmetry cannot be explained by ART being a more frequently available hook than RAT. (RAT has been played 19,000 times and ART only 12,000 times.)

I have highlighted with orange the rows where there is strong evidence that the second word is a blind spot word. The green rows indicate that I suspect a blind spot exists, but other explanations could also account for the imbalance.

All innergrams are potentially useful tools for Bananagrams players since the ability to most quickly rearrange your grid can be the difference between winning and losing a game. Blind spot words are just the innergrams that you are most likely to not have immediately at hand... until now!

Blind spot words:
blot, causal, citric, coral, drat, garb, labile, prefect, reserve, rogue, slat, sloe, snag, stanch.

Other possible blind spot words:
brunt, clod, froth, gird, median, recuse, sidle, spilt

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In the interest of completeness, below are the innergram pairs that I left out of the table because their word counts were too low. (No count exceeded 8.)

scalar	sacral
martial	marital
converse	conserve
eternity	entirety
preserve	perverse
coagulate	catalogue
seashore	seahorse
parental	paternal
compliant	complaint
observe	obverse
reprise	respire
metronome	monotreme
percept	precept

The last two pairs had word counts of zero. Build one of these words in Word² and you may be the first!

Videos of the Omegathon Bananagrams tournament

A couple of short videos from the Bananagrams round of PAX East 2011 Omegathon have shown up on YouTube.

As I understand it, there were 24 Omeganauts at the beginning of the Bananagrams round and 12 after it. This suggests that each team played Bananagrams once and winning their match was essential to advancing.

The first video shows the beginning of a match between two teams.


Watching this video, you can see the difficulties in having two people work on the same grid, particularly at the beginning. The team that the camera spends most of the time on does a pretty good job of coordinating their grid formation verbally. Starting with the long word HASTILY was a smart move. Also, the first team was able to get off to a really fast start because they got an easy set of letters to work with. The other team had to contend with a J, a Q, and two Xs.

The second video anticlimactically cuts to when the match is already over, and there is some controversy over whether the word HASTILY is legal. It's not nearly as interesting as the first video, but I include it for completeness.

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Further reading:

• My previous post on the Bananagrams Omegathon round with photos and discussion of Bananagrams doubles

Follow-up on Bananagrams at PAX East 2011 and Bananagrams doubles

Since this year's PAX East Omegathon paired up players into teams, the Bananagrams round was played in doubles mode. The picture below (from the official Bananagrams Twitter feed), shows a winning grid from the first round of the Bananagrams part of the Omegathon.



I attempted to read off the words from the grid and got:

   H A     P
  NOON B ZOO
   R DEER  IDES
  AS         A
   EEL    FIAT
     E  Z U  E
     A  O E  N
     D COIL
   TEETH
   A R U
   K   MUTER
   EON   I
    N   ME
   PEST
      I
     YET

A few comments on this picture: The grid incorporates a lot of the short words that I find myself using including EEL, EON, YET, and ZOO (two ZOOs, actually). CHUM also seems like a useful word to have in one's Bananagrams vocabulary. And observe the left and right branches of the grid and the way that the players have positioned themselves. If both players are right-handed, it seems to make sense for the player on the right to move closer to the table, so he can more easily reach the upper-right corner of the board with his right hand and still easily cover the lower-right corner of the board. You can see a similar posture adopted in photos of other teams.





It appears that the player on the left sometimes also turns toward the center; this is probably the best strategy, as it will allow the left hand to contribute more.

I've wanted to experiment with Bananagrams doubles for a while now. Knowing that it has been successfully played in the Omegathon gives me confidence that Bananagrams can work well as a team game.

UPDATE: Some video from the Omegathon Bananagrams round is now up

Bananagrams to be an event at the PAX East 2011 Omegathon

PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a semi-annual convention for fans of video games that also includes a few sessions about role-playing games, interactive fiction, and board games. A major event at every PAX is the "Omegathon", a multi-round game tournament for which the twenty (this year, thirty) contestants are chosen randomly from the pre-registered PAX attendees. The Omegathon always features a different set of games. Past selections have included Mario Kart, Doom, Connect Four, Dance Dance Revolution, Tetris, skee-ball, and Pong. The four games that have been announced so far for the March convention in Boston are Katamari Damacy, Operation, Jenga, and Bananagrams. While it won't be a tournament between the best Bananagrams players, I expect that there will be coverage of the event through video or other media, and it will be interesting to see how the competition is set up and how it plays out.

The Omegathon has never before included a word game. Bananagrams will be the first.

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Further reading

• Follow-up on Bananagrams at PAX East 2011 and Bananagrams doubles
• Videos of the Omegathon Bananagrams round
  

A word grid puzzle

What special property does this word grid have?

               ODD
                 ICEBOX
            ECHOED          
          D K  H           
         XEBEC    
       H  E
     BOOKED

The answer, encrypted with ROT-13: "Gur tevq pna or zveebe-ersyrpgrq iregvpnyyl gb trarengr n qvssrerag tevq jvgu inyvq jbeqf." Good luck!

The new crop of games from the makers of Bananagrams: Zip-It, et al.

First they brought us Bananagrams. Last year they introduced Appletters and Pairs in Pears. This fall, they released so many new items that I feel like I am going to have to make a list:

1. Zip-It is like an accelerated version of Bananagrams, except instead of tiles, you get twelve letter cubes. And unlike in Boggle, you can turn each of those cubes and use whichever side you want. A typical time for forming those cubes into a grid of words is reported to be about twenty seconds! It sounds super-frenetic, like playing Bananagrams on a roller coaster. Zip-It comes with Weords, a small book containing game-winning weird words.
2. The 4th Bananagrams book has been released: 10-Minute Bananagrams, in which each puzzle is designed to be solved in 10 minutes or less.
3. The Bananagrams 2011 Page-a-day Calendar - perfect for your favorite Bananagrams addict.
   
   

2014 UPDATE: More recent games from the makers of Bananagrams: Bananagrams WildTiles - a new version of Bananagrams with extra monkey-themed wildcard tiles.

Also available are the French version of Bananagrams, for the family Francophile or polyglot, and the German version of Bananagrams.

UPDATE 2: The release of Oh-Spell is apparently not as imminent as I had wishfully thought. But in the meanwhile we have, coming very soon... Fruitominoes, the first non-word-game game from the makers of Bananagrams.

Unbananagrammable words

In my search for the longest word that you can make in a Bananagrams game, I found a few words (like "floccinaucinihilipilification") which can't be spelled with a standard 144-tile set of Bananagrams because there aren't quite enough of one letter or another. For instance, there are only two Ks in a bag of Bananagrams, and there are at least two words with three or more Ks in common use today.

I started off by studying the letter distribution for a Bananagrams set, shown here:

A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
13	3	3	6	18	3	4	3	12	2	2	5	3	8	11	3	2	9	6	9	6	3	3	2	3	2

And then I decided to compile a sampling of unbananagrammable words (leaving out some obscure or questionable ones), beginning with the letter...

B

Which word has more than three Bs? It appears in The Sound of Music. It's in a song (naturally). It's that "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" song. Answer: The word is flibbertigibbet, meaning a flighty person, and it's generally used in a critical fashion. I kind of like this word and vote that the nuns try to cut flibbertigibbets some slack.

C

There are about 100 words that would require more than three C tiles to construct, but most of them are highly technical, like "diplococcus" (a kind of bacteria) or compound words like "sacrococcyx" that have to do with things near or connecting to the tailbone. (As a corollary, you can make the word coccyx in Bananagrams (if you ever wind up with all 3 Cs).)

A concrescence is a collection of parts that have grown together, like a bunch of cells in a biological context. The verb meaning to grow together is "concresce".

My new favorite C-laden word is scacchic. It's a very obscure word meaning "pertaining to chess". And it is the shortest word in English that contains four Cs.

F

riffraff - The people who are to be kept out. Used in a dismissive fashion. Depending on who's using the word, the riffraff may contain flibbertigibbets.

K

Yes, we are already at K! The two common words with more than two Ks are kickback and knickknack (4 Ks!).

A third example is knickerbockers. Knickerbockers are short pants for men that come down below the knee, but not all the way down to the ankle. They have mostly gone out of fashion, but a variant of knickerbockers can still be seen as a part of the uniform worn by baseball players.

M

metagrammatism - This means the practice of forming anagrams. It more commonly goes by the term "anagrammatism".

mummiform - Shaped like a mummy. There are a lot of cool -iform words like "igniform", meaning shaped like fire and "cucumiform", meaning shaped like a cucumber.

P

whippersnapper - An inexperienced yet cocky kid. The term was originally coined to describe 17th-century slackers who hung out on the street, snapping whips for no reason. Somewhere along the way the meaning morphed to its current form. No thanks to the whippersnappers!

S

stresslessness has an amazing 7 Ss AND it is a word that people actually use sometimes.

possessionlessness, in contrast, seems a little unwieldy and virtually never appears in print. But it does have 8Ss, and that counts for something.

Z

pizzazz is kind of amazing for being over 57% Z (not to mention 71% pizza). "Pizzazz" is the shortest word that you cannot spell with one set of Bananagrams tiles.


That's it! There are really very few words you can't spell with Bananagrams. And maybe a spell checker.

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Further reading:

• The longest word that you can make in Bananagrams
• Comparison of letter distributions from different word games

Meet Kigonagrams: Bananagrammy thing & online haiku toy

The simple, elegant design of Bananagrams tiles lends them to a wide range of activities. They are perfect for rapidly sliding around a table as you race to build words faster than your opponents in a frenzy of QATs and JETs and ZOOs. And they are also perfect for less focused, more creative play, like building little Bananagrams sculptures or composing Bananagrams poetry.

It was this last activity that inspired a design student named Fred Truman to program an online environment for rearranging letter tiles into haikus. It's called Kigonagrams, a name that Truman explains as

the combination of anagrams (or obviously bananagrams) and kigo, which are words or phrases associated with a particular season used in Japanese poetry.

Kigonagrams starts off by giving you a randomly selected haiku, like this: And then it sets you loose to play with the tiles, so you can make something like this:
The controls for resetting the tiles to their original positions and requesting a new set of tiles are way at the bottom of the page.

The grayed-out "tweet your haiku @kigonagrams" is an encouragement, but also an indication of a possible future feature.

The most fun part for me was dragging one tile into others and watching as a bunch of tiles got pushed out of position. This kind of physics modelling is a feature that would be cool to see in other online word games someday.

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Further reading:

• My previous excursions into Bananagrams poems and word game poetry

Scramble: Part word game, part scavenger hunt, part Easter egg hunt

If you travelled back in time to the 2010 ARGfest in Atlanta (a conference for Alternate Reality Game designers and fans), you could have played in an original mutated word game called Scramble, masterminded by ARG designer Brooke Thompson.

Large letters have been scattered around the park and it is your job to find one. Once you do, you've got to find enough other people who have found letters so that you can form a word... a real word... not just one of those made up ones... well, not unless you can convince the Word Master that it’s a real one. Once you've gathered a word, head to the Word Master. Simple, right?

Not so much! Like Scrabble, each letter is worth a certain number of points... do you keep that Z you found or trade it in for an E? How many words, real words, can you spell with your letters? How many little tasks you were able to compete on the way? And... how quickly did you get back to the Word Master? Oh yes! It’s a battle between time & creativity. And it’s up to you to win.

Further event details may be found here. The exact rules of the game are not specified, but given that it was an experimental game, I don't think they need to be. The essence of the idea is enough for anyone who wants to try this. It seems like it would be well-suited to a party or also in a classroom, as it is the kind of challenge that also has educational value and teaches kids how to work together and think creatively.

I'd probably modify the game to make it more Bananagrams-like, requiring each group to form a single grid, and getting points for each word that they also can find a physical example of. Even I would like to play in that game!

I found a blog posting from someone who played in this game who writes:

The game was called Scramble, and the letters were valued like Scrabble tiles, the goal being to grab a group of people and get good letters to maximize your Scrabble score with them. Given that you could get credit for multiple words with the same letters, I picked up pretty quickly that the thing to do was to get 4-5 people, nab some good letters, and make lots of anagrams. You also got a double score for taking a picture of your word with an example of the word. My team went for C-O-D-E-S (and coeds, decos, and edocs), got pictures for all our words, and totally stomped on the other team, who only had one word, even though it was longer.

High marks to that team for devising a winning strategy on the fly, though if I were Word Master, I would have given the thumbs-down to the dubious "decos" and the hideous "edocs". A few more words like that, and I might think this was part of the ARGHfest.

Synchronized Bananagramming and other ways to play Bananagrams

In thinking about games of Bananagrams I have played, I've realized that the amount of time it takes me to finish a grid can depend heavily on what letters I get and what order I get them in. Thus, the winner of any single game can depend heavily on the randomness of the drawn tiles.

Here is a way to take a massive amount of the randomness out of a Bananagrams game: Have someone who is not going to play, sort through all the letters and give each player an identical set of 21 (or however many) tiles to start off with. Also set up identical queues of tiles for each player to peel from. The outcome of such a match should be determined extremely strongly by the actual performances of the players.

Admittedly, it takes a lot of the drama out of the game and makes it a very different exercise. Played in a less competitive fashion, this would be a really strange and unique game: Imagine the reactions as all players peel a Q at the same time. It would be almost like everyone was sharing the same experience. Comparing grids at the end would also be interesting as it would better highlight the different approaches and tricks of each player.

This idea suggests to me a puzzle: Is there a way that two players could agree on an algorithm ahead of time which would allow them to make the same (or nearly the same) word grid? In principle, of course, you could just give them the same instructions as a Bananagrams-playing computer program, so the better question is whether there is a relatively simple way of doing it?

One more twist: It would be interesting to try to play a game where the objective was for players to make maximally similar grids. Without looking at the other player's grid, it would have a sort of mind-reading, Taboo-ish potential. If played where the players could look at the other players' grids (and where we would go back to a standard random drawing of tiles), it would add a sort of frantic element to gameplay.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, I've discovered that the Supernifty online speed Scrabble game (which I previously reviewed) actually implements the synchronization option that I described above. When one player starts a new Supernifty speed Scrabble game, they have the option (which appears to be the default) of having all players receive the same letters. This option can be changed by clicking on the link under the progress bar that counts down the time to the beginning of the game. So if you want to experiment with synchronizing your Bananagrams, you now just need two computers and a willing accomplice.

Stupid Bananagrams tricks: Word grid with mirror symmetry

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to make a perfectly symmetric Bananagrams word grid using all 144 Bananagrams tiles. I decided to use mirror symmetry, so a word spelled out horizontally on the left hand side would have to be reversed on the right hand side and yet still spell a real word. Can it be done? Let's find out.

First, I consulted my letter distribution for Bananagrams to see which letters occurred an odd number of times in a Banangrams set. For instance, there are three W tiles, so I knew that at least one (and possibly all three) would have to occur on the center line of the grid to maintain mirror symmetry.

I then tried to build those letters into vertical words. Next I built some horizontal palindromes off of those center-line words. I got some good palindromic words from Wiktionary.

Finally, I worked on linking everything up. This step took the longest time. Fortunately, I found a list of words, that when reversed, yield different English words (like "tuba" and "abut"). These are called "semordnilaps". I particularly liked the ERGO/OGRE pair, so I managed to work that one into my grid. After a lot of fiddling around, I wound up with the grid shown below.

C H GAG R M OH E HO I MADAM I N A A N KNOW WONK E B E U EYE U R R R R OGRE ERGO BUN NUB O O X J P J X RECAPS A SPACER S I L V L I S L A E A L T T Q DEIFIED Q U A L A U I Z O Z I TIDE EWE EDIT V O O V Y TIN NIT Y F T F STATS D

Voila! The world's first palindromic Bananagrams grid!

Spanish Bananagrams tiles spotted in the wild!

Since the introduction of the Spanish version of Bananagrams, I've been bugged by the fact that none of the online photos showed what the extra Spanish tiles looked like. And then I found this creative attempt to make sentences using all the tiles in a Bananagrams set. As the set on hand happened to be Spanish Bananagrams, three of the four special Spanish Bananagrams tiles are visible in the picture: LL, RR, and CH:

There you have it folks: actual proof that Spanish Bananagrams is not merely a figment of my imagination. (Though I admit that the image of the CH tile is almost as fuzzy as a Bigfoot photo.)

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UPDATE: Huzzah! Official photos of Spanish Bananagrams grids can now be seen on sites selling Spanish Bananagrams. And they include the elusive Ñ tile:

Bananagrams art video

I don't normally post videos, but there are not a lot of pangram videos out there, so I am willing to make an exception. It is a 30-second exception and is playful and delightful and features Bananagrams.

Here is the direct link to the video on Vimeo. If you don't like Flash, it is also viewable there through an HTML5 player, or you can download the video, if you sign up for an account.

The guy responsible for this video has a blog where you can see his other, more intense work with images.

What I like about this video most is how it seems like merely the introduction to a grand adventure with Rube Goldberg machines and wordplay and Banangrams.

The Bananagrams writing contest is now open

The Newport Review's Bananagrams writing contest (previously previewed here) has started with the posting of the grid of required words and some more specific rules. The grid,

            M
           JOLT
            N
         H  E
        MINTY
     FOXED
     A
     C
     E

has really only one odd word: "foxed". "Foxed" can apparently be an adjective (used to describe paper having yellow-brown stains), but I think the people judging the contest will be expecting "foxed" to be used like "outfoxed", as in, outwitted. Which is precisely what you will want to have done to your opponents.

Good luck!

Before there was Bananagrams, there was Word-Sport

In the past, I've proposed, half-seriously, the idea of a future where Bananagrams is played on a serious tournament level, like Scrabble or chess. But it turns out that the idea of something like a Speed Scrabble tournament was floated and promoted before Bananagrams was even invented.

First, the game: It's called Word-Sport. Word-Sport is basically Speed Scrabble with some modifications. It is played with the entire Scrabble tile set (including the blanks, which are excluded from Speed Scrabble as normally played). Word-Sport oddly doesn't require that you actually link all your words into a single grid. Instead, there is a scoring system that offers rewards for single grids, for never allowing your opponent to peel (more feasible when you are playing with the smaller Scrabble tile set), and for words 7 or more letters long.

Plans were in the works for a version of the Word-Sport game you could buy (including some optional wild tiles) and a computer version of the game, playable over the Internet (modelled after Literati and paralleling the Large Animal Games Flash version of Bananagrams).

An equally fascinating part of the Word-Sport web site is the page that describes the birth of indoor rowing races. (Imagine a treadmill race, but with rowing machines). I am not making these races up. Apparently indoor rowing races inspired and motivated the idea of Word-Sport tournaments, complete with timers and specially designed tables.

Exploring the Word-Sport web site is like peering into an alternate universe because I can totally imagine a world where Word-Sport took off, pre-empting Bananagrams entirely.

Article about Bananagrams, Zip-It, and Oh-Spell

A Rhode Island newspaper published an article on a talk that Abe Nathanson (the Top Banana at Bananagrams International) recently gave. There are lots of great quotes. For instance, he reveals that, while he originally wanted to have Bananagrams sets manufactured locally, that would have resulted in them being sold for seventy to eighty dollars apiece.

Best of all, there's plenty of information on the new crop of games:

Zip-It, Nathanson said, was developed to be played within an eight-square-inch area and "is almost as fast as rock, paper, scissors." It involves 24 six-sided cubes and plays like a sped up version of Bananagrams, with players racing each other to complete ten word-grids first.

The simplicity and rapidity of Zip-It, says Nathanson, would make it a great drinking game for bars.

"I suspect that at bars it will start as Zip-It and wind up as Tip-It," Nathanson said.

His latest creation is based on the traditional card game "Oh Hell." Nathanson's version, Oh Spell, is a word-based card game that substitutes font patterns for suits.

"I don't know why no one has thought of this before," Nathanson said. "With numbers you are limited, but with words, creation is infinite."

This tells us that Oh-Spell will be a trick-taking card game, which still sounds kind of like Quiddler, but we may have to wait a couple more months to find out exactly how Oh-Spell works.