A review of the word-tree building game Konexi

I previously posted about how intrigued I was about a new game that involved assembling letters into a precarious tree of words. Now, I have finally played this game (Konexi), and it exceeded my expectations.

The first player places a letter on the table, and then every successive move involves building letters off of that first letter, such that no other letter touches the table. The letters have little notches and also little isolated teeth, like the teeth of a gear, that fit nicely into the notches, while allowing a little bit of movement. By matching up a tooth of one letter with a notch of another letter, you can add the new letter to the tree, subject to the physical stability of the placement.

On your move, you have a choice between two (effectively) randomly chosen letters. You take one and try to add it to the tree in a way that allows you to connect together a set of letters that can be anagrammed to form a word. The letters must be a contiguous set. Your score is the number of letters in the word that you were able to make.

Even once you find a set of letters in the existing tree that you can connect your chosen letter to, to form a new word, it can often be a huge challenge to place that new letter. It must connect one of its notches or teeth to a complementary tooth or notch of one of the letters in your word, and it must result in a balanced structure that continues to stand on its own. Consequently, whenever someone is placing a new letter, there is a tension to the process that is similar to those moments when someone is removing a piece from a Jenga tower (though it is generally not at the Jenga level of pressure). However, Konexi is actually better than Jenga because you have far more options as to where and how you can place letters. It's also a good game for building intuition about concepts like the center of mass of an object.

This game can play out in very different manners, depending upon the structure of the tree that the players form, and the letters that they choose. With enough vowels in your tree, you may find that it is easy to make four- and five-letter words on every turn. If insufficient vowels are available, players may at times struggle to form any words at all.

If someone accidentally knocks down the tree, that player loses three points, and a new tree is started on the next play. Play continues until someone scores 20 points.

This game is basically exactly as cool as it looks, so if you think it might be your kind of game, you will probably enjoy it.

The irresistible game of Picture Telephone

One of my favorite games is Picture Telephone. Like the children's game of Telephone (in which a message is whispered from one player to the next, becoming garbled in the process, to hilarious effect), Picture Telephone is about transmitting a sentence through a sequence of players. What distinguishes Picture Telephone is that sentences are alternately written and then depicted through drawing. Players are not allowed to write words in their drawings; that would defeat the whole purpose of the game.

For an idea of how it works, consider this mock-up of a typical game:

(This image is from the now defunct site for an online version of Picture Telephone called Broken Picture Telephone. In my experience, actual Picture Telephone games will have complete sentences and will be funnier.)

Inevitably, there will be someone in the group whose drawings of a person talking into a microphone will be mistaken for a person licking an ice cream cone, and someone else in the group will routinely have trouble recognizing what the previous person drew. These players will only make the game more fun.

There are some unwritten rules to this game: Players must legitimately try to communicate the message that they are given. It is very easy to deliberately derail the game and really spoils the fun for everyone. This is fundamentally a cooperative game.

As a corollary, it only makes sense to write as an initial sentence, a sentence that you feel reasonably certain that the next person can draw. Action sentences, like "The picnic was ruined by ants", are good. Don't worry, the sentence will often become more complex and challenging as it makes its way around the circle.

The dynamics of this game are interesting. Occasionally one sentence will make it all the way through the game essentially unchanged. Sentences can even diverge from their original subject and then return to it. Certain concepts seem to have strange attractors in Picture Telephone, such as how many four-legged animals tend to converge to dogs or cats.

The core of the game is the challenge of receiving a written sentence and trying to figure out how you can possibly make a drawing from which the next person can correctly infer the original sentence. I enjoy tremendously this process. The drawing is fun too. Basically, there is nothing about this game that I dislike.

All that you need to play this game is a bunch of 3-by-5 note cards and writing utensils.

As your group becomes more skilled at communicating through drawing, you can use more complex sentences. Consequently, the sophistication of the game scales with the players, like Dixit and chess do.

I have enjoyed this game for years, and I consider it to be one of the most fun games to play whenever a group of seven or nine player is available. It is certainly the game that has made me laugh the most. I have decided to write about it now because I recently spent rather a lot of time playing a new online variation on Picture Telephone called Drawception, about which I will say a lot more in the next post.

Lexicographer: the iPhone version of Guess My Word

As an addendum to my review of the online Guess My Word game, I'm reviewing the iPhone companion game, Lexicographer. Just as with Guess My Word, Lexicographer allows you to guess words and tells you whether your guess is before or after the secret word ("my word").

But rather than having two daily words to guess, Lexicographer will let you keep playing new rounds of "Guess my word!" all day long.

Once you start, there is a running timer (counting tenths of a second!). I found that this totally changed the guessing experience for me. Without a timer, I try to minimize the number of guesses I need to guess the word, choosing guesses in a calculating but leisurely fashion. With the timer constant ticking away, I guessed words in a more frenzied manner.

There is an option that allows you to see how many words are left in the range that you have bracketed. This is a useful way of sharpening your sense of how words are distributed in the alphabet and where the best bisection point is.

We increased the difficulty level from 1 (where a typical word was "talent") to 10 and then struggled on the last few guesses until we narrowed the word down to four possible words (between "parapets" and "paraphrase"). But we were totally stumped at that point. After guessing "paraphobia" (which I hoped to be defined as the fear of parallel lines) and finding that it was not actually a real word, I randomly guessed "paraph". And it was, to my stunned triumph, correct.

(It turns out that a paraph is a flourish someone adds below or to the end of their signature. The example that first comes to mind is below John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence:

It's believed that paraphs originated during the Middle Ages to discourage forgery. I wondered how effective this might have been until I read in Joe Nickell's Detecting Forgery (browsable in Google Books) the following:

It might also be noted that the concept of individuality that today may be expressed in a distinctive signature was less valued in the penmanship of an earlier time, when adherence to strict copybook form was regarded as a virtue. As Jonathan Goldberg notes in Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, "in fact, what differentiated one italic signature from another is more often a paraph, flourish, than the letter itself." [...] Indeed, sometimes so distinctive was the eighteenth-century paraph ([...] like that of John Hancock's or Benjamin Franklin's) that it was sometimes used instead of the signature, thus concealing one's identity except to the initiate.

That was a really interesting word to learn about, but given that I got it through sheer luck, I think I'll be reducing the Lexicographer difficulty level to something more like 5 for now...)

I think that each version of the game has its merits. Guess My Word is fun because you can compete against other people (mostly just names on the leaderboard, unless you happen to know them or invite your friends to play) and see what sequence of words they chose by mousing over their guess history. Guess My Word words often feel more special, as though I can develop an intuition about the kind of words that are likely to be chosen; it's possible that Lexicographer words have a similar property, and I just haven't played enough to pick up on it. Lexicographer's strength is that it can be pulled out anytime and played with a group of friends, as many times as you like. Showing the number of words that you have bracketed allows you to get better at picking the word to bisect the range. Not only does this improve your Word-Guessing ability, it also adds an extra layer to the game, making for a nice complement to Guess My Word.

---

Update:

• You may notice that Lexicographer no longer seems to be available on its former iTunes Store page. My guess is that the developer decided not to renew his ($99/year) iOS developer license, and Apple has nixed his apps. Which is a pity.
• You can no longer play the original Guess My Word game, but there is a functioning direct descendent here. You can also read my previous post about Guess My Word.

Guess My Word - a fun word-guessing game

Important notice: This post is about an online game that no longer exists at the linked URL, but you can find the same game (now maintained by someone else here.

---

Imagine if you were trying to play Twenty Questions but weren't allowed to ask about the meaning of the word, only its position in the dictionary. Well somebody else imagined it first, wrote it up, and put it online.

It's called "Guess my word!", and each day there is a new word to guess.

You start by making some initial guess about where the word might be in the alphabet:


You find out where the word is with respect to your guesses (with the closest words being highlighted in blue and red (indicating before and after, respectively)):


And after a number of guesses, eventually you should converge on the word:


...after which you can enter your name to appear on the leaderboard and check out other people's times and guesses. It's a good way to work on your active vocabulary when you are not playing Bananagrams...

You can play Guess My Word by clicking here. If you really like it, there are now two separate words you can play each day. Plus there is a new iPhone app called Lexicographer which is a little different, and for which I have written a separate review.

The best thing about this game is that you can also easily play it offline as a two-person game. You can take turns thinking of the secret word and guessing, and since this can be played without pen and paper (as long as you can remember the two current bounding words), it makes a great game to play in the car.

---

Further reading:

• My Lexicographer review - which includes further discussion of Guess My Word

Ghost, Superghost, and Disorder: Word-dodging games

I recently played a game called Disorder, which is a neat little word-building (or more accurately, word-avoiding) game. To explain it, it's best to start with the simpler games that it is based on:

We begin with an old parlor game called Ghost. In Ghost, players take turns adding letters to a word they are building, trying to avoid being the one to actually finish a complete word. If a player adds a letter that makes it impossible to form a real word (e.g., T-R-I-C-J), another player can challenge him. If the first player cannot name a legitimate word that he's trying to make, he loses the game. But if the challenger is wrong, he loses instead.

Example gameplay:

Player 1: A
Player 2: M [A and AM are words, but words shorter than 4 letters are permitted.]
Player 1: B
[At this point in the game, there are lots of words that players may be thinking of like AMBITIOUS, AMBULANCE, AMBUSH, AMBIGUOUS, AMBLE. But with each new letter the options narrow.]
Player 2: E
[This is a brilliant play because the only common words that can be formed starting with AMBE all have the root AMBER which is a valid word. The options for Player 1 are to choose the R and lose or choose another letter and try to bluff. Bluffing adds an interesting gameplay dimension to Ghost and related games.]

A Ghost variant called Superghost allows players to add letters to both the beginning and the end of the proto-word, opening wide the strategic possibilities and making for a game that you really have to think about.

The writer James Thurber enjoyed playing Superghost with his friends and wrote a New Yorker essay about it back in 1951 (delightfully titled, 'Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? (Or, if you put an "o" on "understo," you'll ruin my "thunderstorm")'). The essay can be found on the New Yorker site (behind a paywall) or in a collection of Thurber's writings called Thurber Country).

Finally we come to Disorder, which is a board game that comes with 1) cards that players get dealt so that they have a hand of letters to choose from, 2) a long skinny board with slots for each card to go into as the word is being built, and 3) chips for keeping score. In addition to giving players a set of letters that they can use for word-extending, Disorder introduces a few more twists on Superghost. Mixed into the deck of letters are four types of power cards. The Exchange card lets you swap a card in your hand with a card on the board. The Switch card lets you take two cards on the board and switch their positions. The Squeeze card allows you to make a one-card gap anywhere in the word and insert a card from your hand. And the Pass card lets you skip a turn.

And finally, any card can be used as a wild card, simply by flipping it over (they all say "wild!" on the back) and laying it down as part of the word. Wild cards can be tricky to deal with since (unlike in Scrabble, where a player declares what the blank tile represents) in Disorder, the wild card can be any letter. This makes it easier to build toward a word without giving away to your opponents what you are planning, but it also makes it difficult to think of all the possible words that could be in play.

Scoring is simple. Each card has a point value on it, with harder letters like Q and Z having correspondingly larger point values (roughly like in Scrabble). At the end of the round, the point values of the cards that have been played on the board are summed, and the total is awarded to whoever lost the round. After how ever many rounds are played, the winner is the player who accumulates the least points. I enjoy playing Disorder so much that I am willing to play without keeping score (though that may just be the Bananagrammer in me).

Disorder is a great game. I have already bought someone a copy for Christmas.

I like having the cards and the board, but in a pinch, this could be played with Bananagrams tiles with a few modifications: Each player can take 7 Bananagrams tiles and, in the absence of racks, just stand the tiles up on their edges. Note that Disorder has a flat letter distribution (4 cards for each letter of the alphabet). While I haven't tried it, I think that using the standard Bananagrams distribution of letters will still be fine. The important adjustment I would recommend borrowing from Disorder is the notion that you can play a tile face-down and have it act as a wildcard. If you're playing for the first time, I suggest starting off with the regular Ghost version until you are ready to graduate to the Superghost variety.


Ghost lends itself to rule variation, spawning games with names like "Superduperghost" and "Spook". My ambition is to come up with a mutation that will best them all. I think I'll call it "Pac-Man".

Scrabb.ly/WordSquared - Massively Multiplayer Online Word-formation Game

The biggest word game ever is slowly growing still bigger over at Scrabb.ly (recently renamed "WordSquared"). Created by four programmers over 48 hours for a competition, it's effectively an infinite grid (though currently limited to a giant square with each side being about 200 million tiles long) on which people all over the Internet are simultaneously laying down tiles to build words. You can play it in most recent web browsers at http://wordsquared.com.



For your first move, you can build a word (using a subset of your seven available tiles) off of any available tile on the board. For all subsequent moves, you need to build off of your own words.

Scoring is like in Scrabble. The tiles have values on them, and the grid has been formed by putting a bunch of Scrabble boards together, overlapping the rows and columns on the edges, so that the triple word score squares are shared with the neighboring boards.

Additionally, you have a certain number of available "lives" like in a video game. If you swap out your rack for new letters, you lose a life. If you form a word that overlaps one of those bonus squares in the center (the ones with the star on them), you gain a new life.

Probably my favorite part about this game is exploring the map of the grid. A lot of the overall structure of the interlocking words looks rather organic, but there are a few places on the grid where someone (possibly automated scripts) have constructed long staircases of two-letter words or other regular structures.



One downside is that the site is a bit slow to load, and even just when I switch over to the browser tab that has Scrabb.ly in it, the browser hangs for a while. Every time you enter a word, the game takes several seconds to update and give you your new letters. [This is no longer an issue, as the updated version of the game is much faster.] Also, the large scale map seems to be updated very infrequently (maybe every few hours or once a day), so by exploring the apparent frontier (by switching back from the map view to the zoomed-in grid view), you will find that there may be words several board lengths beyond where the map suggests they will be.

If you stop playing and come back later, your previous position on the map and tiles should be restored, assuming you are using the same web browser... Player identification is done through cookies. "Claiming" your words by adding a username (or Twitter username (preceded by the "@" symbol)), just makes public your position on the high scores list... it does not enable you to set a password or log in from another computer or browser. I would guess that this will be changed in Scrabb.ly 2.0. If you are lost on the board, you can find your words by clicking on them in the word history bar on the right hand side.

The game is still a bit buggy. If it gets confused about what tiles you have or anything else, you can always reload the page in your browser. And I have found that the blanks can never be used to form words in all but the most recent browser versions. If I try to use them, I get prompted to enter what letter they represent, but then the word never gets accepted. There were reports that blanks would be accepted if used as the final letter in a word, but that's not working for me either. Basically, I save up blanks until my rack becomes unusable and then hit the "Swap Tiles" button.

One other caution about this game: It can be kind of addictive.

If you want a lot more Scrabb.ly information, you can watch this YouTube video of one of the Scrabb.ly programmers giving a talk about the game. There are some fairly technical details between about minutes 5 and 10, but most of the rest of the talk is pretty accessible.

The designers have apparently considered making a similar gigantic chess or checkers game (with appropriate rule modifications) or giving some classic 8-bit Atari games the Scrabb.ly treatment. A planned Scrabb.ly 2.0 will have some social features and additional new game mechanics. They might also incorporate play in foreign languages, but still on the same grid as the original game, though possibly starting each language in a different sector of the board, just for the fun of watching what would happen when two language grids collide.

---

Further reading:

• The Totally Unofficial Wordsquared FAQ


• Another post I wrote on advanced scrabb.ly techniques.


• Hypothetical huge word grid - a few paragraphs I wrote on what it would be like if someone tried to make a word grid out of all allowed words. (Note that according to the video linked above, the Scrabb.ly board has not incorporated every possible word yet because some words are really rather hard to make.)

Dixit Review

My new favorite game is Dixit. It is this cool game, originally from France, in which everyone has a hand of cards with fanciful illustrations on them, and one player has to say something (a word, a phrase, a sentence, a sound effect) and place one of their cards face down. Everyone else adds a card to try to fool the other players into picking their card. I find that the trick is to pick a card that is close to the theme, but not too obvious about it. The "storyteller" player wants to get neither all of the players to choose his card nor none of the players. Something in between earns him three points. Players who pick his card earn points. Players whose card is picked by others earn points (which allow the players to move their rabbit pieces around the board). The first to the finish wins.

Gameplay resembles a combination of Apples to Apples and Balderdash, but, in my opinion, Dixit is a much better game. It's a fun and unique challenge. The artwork is gorgeous. Everyone I've played with seems to love this game. Also, you don't just have to take my word for it. Dixit was recently awarded the coveted Spiel des Jahres award, so the Germans like it too.

If you want more Dixit cards (as I expect you eventually will), you can get them through an expansion pack.


UPDATE: There is now a third Dixit set: Dixit Odyssey. It is not just an expansion pack. It includes 84 more cards, a board, and all the necessary tokens. The rules has have been slightly tweaked, and there are also now variant rules that allow for, up to 12 players to play, either in Team variation or a streamlined Party variation. The box is big enough to hold the cards from all three Dixit games.

It's been over a year since I first played Dixit, and I still get excited about playing it. I think Dixit is destined to be one of those classic, mainstay games.

Online Speed Scrabble: a review

I discovered that there is a web site called Supernifty which has an online Speed Scrabble game that can be played for free. Naturally, I decided to try it.

To play, you have to go through a straightforward registration process which requires only an e-mail address, a password, and a nickname. Once you've logged in you are greeted by a listing of available games that you can join, or you can create your own game. The feature that I particularly like here is that you can give a name to your game by typing it into the blank before creating the game. In principle, this gives players the ability to set up games for different skill levels or with different rules. Or if someone wants to practice on their own, they could call their game "Solitaire Only."

The game is an implementation of the "Take Two" variant of Speed Scrabble: You start with seven tiles, and once someone has formed a valid grid, two more tiles appear on the top row of every player's board, and play advances to the next "round". There is some scoring system where you get credit every time you win a round. Whoever wins the tenth and final round wins the game (and gets a lot more points). Points are also based on how long your longest word is in each round, and on how competitive your opponent is.


Diligent readers of this blog will know that I am not a fan of Speed Scrabble, but this online version does away with a few of the nuisances of the offline game: Starting with a small number of letters and no ability to dump tiles makes it hard or sometimes impossible to form a valid grid early in the game. If you encounter such a situation in Supernifty Speed Scrabble, you can just skip that round by pushing the "Give up on round" button to get two more letters. (At least you can do this when playing alone, I did not run into this situation when playing with other players.)

I was a little surprised at how often the initial set of letters could be formed into a grid of words, and I started to suspect that this was by design when I got letters that seemed to coax me into forming a symmetric grid for a couple of rounds (as shown). Whether or not this is built into the program is something that I can't tell yet...

The game is implemented in Javascript, rather than Flash, which may be the reason that the interface is more minimalist. I liked how smooth and clean it felt, and since many of the games I played were solitaire games, it was overall kind of a relaxing experience (except the few times that the timer started to run down and I had to franticly drag tiles around the board.) My only frustration with the interface was that it's not possible to select a rectangle of tiles (as in the electronic version of Bananagrams) and move it around. This sometimes leads to having to shift a bunch of words from one place to another, one tile at a time. Aside from that issue, it is otherwise an intuitive interface, so you can just start playing straight away. If you'd like a more detailed description, try the official description of Speed Scrabble.

There were only a few people drifting on and off the site while I was playing, and often I was the only player on the site at all. If I am interpreting the scoring system correctly, the list of high scores corroborates the idea that there are just a handful of hard-core players and some others who have played on many occasions. But the site just came online in August of 2009 and an iPhone client for the game has been recently released, so the number of players may be on the rise.

If you like online word games and you want to try something different, I can recommend Supernifty's version of Speed Scrabble.

The Werewolf game

Wired Magazine has a nice article about Werewolf, a sort of parlor game that is apparently becoming very popular in certain circles.

A game called "Mafia" was invented in the mid-eighties and spread rapidly. It showed up in the United States and was then modified to have a more fitting werewolf theme by Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a., Zarf) who then popularized it on the Internet. Andrew Plotkin is a major figure in the indie Interactive Fiction community which produces text adventures that are the evolutionary descendants of the old Infocom games.

Just as you might refer to Bananagrams as like Scrabble without a board (or pauses or lots of other things...), Werewolf has been described as like poker without cards. In a typical game, two players are secretly designated as Werewolves and the rest are Villagers. The game is divided into a series of day and night turns. During the nighttime turns, everyone closes their eyes except the Werewolves, who silently pick a Villager to "kill". They indicate this to a moderator who removes that person from the game. During the daytime turns, the Villagers have the opportunity to pick someone that they think is a Werewolf and lynch them. Since the identities of the Werewolves are secret, the Werewolves can participate in the debate over who should be killed, trying to maintain their cover and divert suspicion to someone else. The object of the game for the Villagers is to identify and eliminate all the Werewolves. To win, the Werewolves only have to survive until there are the same number of Villagers left as Werewolves.

It is a game of persuasion and bluffing and inference. It's very interesting to see how different people play the game and what tactics are successful in convincing a crowd to choose a certain way.

Detailed instructions can be found on Zarf's page on Werewolf. Or you might like the extra details compiled by Wired, including how to host your own Werewolf game, a cheat sheet, and the many different extra roles that can be added.

All that you need to play Werewolf is a group of people, but if you'd like some fancy cards to designate who the Werewolves are and who plays the other roles, you can find a PDF of free Werewolf cards that you can print out here (courtesy of http://www.ee0r.com/proj/werecard.html). Or if you want to buy a more formal version, the Looney Labs "Are You A Werewolf?" set is pretty cheap. One could, of course, use any other scheme for designating the Werewolves. For instance: each player chooses a Bananagrams tile from a pool that is pre-arranged to have 2 or 3 W tiles for the Werewolves and enough E tiles for everyone else.

If you are looking for a game that is out of the ordinary, I can definitely recommend Werewolf.

Review of the Bananagrams iPhone app

The Bananagrams application for iPhone and iPod touch is now available [link to iTunes Store] for $4.99. [Update (03/2010): It is on sale for 99 cents.] It is pretty much an exact port of the Bananagrams game on Facebook and seems to differ only in the interface.

When playing offline, you can play the two one-player games: Solo Cafe (which is timed and involves forming a grid from 21 tiles, with no peeling (though dumping is an option)) and Solitaire (also timed, but requires peeling to finish the 36 or 72 tile bunch).

You can move around to different parts of the board by putting two fingers on the screen and dragging the board. You can also zoom into or away from the board by using the standard iPhone pinching motion.

If you put your finger right on top of a tile to select it, it should pop up a little bit above your finger tip so you can see what letter you are holding. (It leaves behind a white square outline to indicate the actual tile position). You then drag the tile (in pretty much exactly the same way that you use a mouse to drag a tile in the online version of the Bananagrams game) and then remove your finger off the screen to drop the tile where your finger was last touching.

One improvement over the Flash version of Bananagrams is that the iPhone version takes advantage of multi-touch technology by allowing you to select multiple individual tiles at the same time. Put one finger on one tile, a second on another tile, and a third on yet another tile, and you can move them all around independently. I confess that I have not been able to work this into my game yet, but this feature has serious potential.

It also has the ability to select a group of tiles at the same time, which works pretty much like selecting a bunch of file icons in a typical computer operating system graphical interface: 1) Click on the screen somewhere (by pressing your finger). 2) Drag somewhere else to form a rectangle, bounded by the first and last points. 3) Everything inside has been selected and can be (for instance) dragged simultaneously.

I think that there is a bug in the current implementation though, since there is no visual indication that the rectangular selection is taking place; you just have to imagine it. Once you have completed the selection, the selected tiles light up (slightly). Also, the option to rotate the selected tiles (which I described here for the Facebook version) is currently unavailable.

The game works in both landscape and portrait orientations, though I find that I have to start off in the portrait orientation (so there are the initially overturned tiles on the top and my grid on the bottom). After the grid has formed and the peeling has begun, it sometimes feels more natural to rotate the device and switch to the landscape orientation (depending on the shape of the grid).

As with the online version, if you accumulate enough points you can acquire different tile sets and backgrounds (as shown in the example above).

[At this point, I decided to consider the game for a while longer, ultimately returning six months later to finish this review.]

It would be nice if you could keep playing music while playing Bananagrams. I think that if a song is playing when Bananagrams is launched, you should have the option to suppress sound effects and listen to what you want.

When playing offline, the program does not retain your best time. When playing solitaire Bananagrams (which is a pretty good simulation of an actual Bananagrams game if you play the 36-tile version), I like to time myself and try to beat my own best time. Offline statistics-keeping would be a nice feature.

The online functionality works a bit fitfully over a slow Internet connection. The game needs to transfer things like icons (for player avatars) and background images for the board. It can take a while to transmit game results (which is surprising since very little data needs to be sent). Sometimes a dialog box would pop up saying that the game had lost the network connection, and other times I would play all the way through, and then at the end, the game would fail to report the results to the central server. If you have a decent Internet connection, this should not be a problem.

Other bugs: I got into this situation where I could not scroll the board any further to the right, and my letters were right up against this edge. A workaround is to grab all the tiles and move them away from the edge of the board. Also, though I clicked on the "Remember Me" option for logging into my account, the program has forgotten my login information at least once so far. (It is the e-mail address that you need to log in with, not the name that you register under.)

I'm not so crazy about the size of the iPhone screen. You can resize the game so either you can see the whole board simultaneously but the tiles are small (and sometimes hard to select) or so the tiles are big enough to easily select (like, you can see them pop up from around your fingertip) but then you have to pan around to see different parts of the game. The iPad, on the other hand, will probably be the ideal platform for this game once Large Animal Games releases an iPad-optimized version (not that I know that this is under development).

The final verdict: I am probably not in the target market for this game. I love Bananagrams, but I don't play iPhone games very much. Still, I sometimes fire up the app and play a few rounds of the 36-tile version of "Bananagrams Solitaire". It's OK for that. Who this game is really for is Facebook Bananagrams addicts and people with fast Internet connections. If you fit into these two categories, the bugs described above will probably fade from memory as you get caught up in the online Bananagrams slugfests which is where the action really is.

In closing, "Carpe aríenam!" [Seize the banana!].

So I played the online version of Bananagrams...

I finally played the Facebook version of Bananagrams. (I suspect that the other versions (Bebo and MySpace) are basically the same.) It is a Flash application with a colorful interface and sound effects.

At first I trained on "Solo Cafe", a timed solitaire game where all the letters were revealed at the beginning. The first game I got an easy set of letters and was basically struggling with the mouse controls. I then played a few more games, doing a bit worse. Finally I was able to beat my initial time (by about 50%), so I figured maybe I was ready to try playing against live opponents.

I was faced with a screen showing many games in progress and one that was waiting for enough players to start. I clicked on the "waiting" one, which may have been a mistake because as soon as it came up on my screen the game started. I think there were four other people in the game at the beginning. I didn't have much time to look at what was going on in the sidebar (where you can see pictures of your opponents and very tiny depictions of their live grids). I did notice when one guy exited the game as there was some kind of brief pop-up notification. (Seeing the grids and remaining letters of one's opponents in a heads-up display would be a nice option for meatspace Bananagrams.) I was the first to finish with all of my letters, but then I realized that the game wasn't over. (Playing Solo Cafe had acclimated me to not peeling.) So I clicked on the pile of tiles in the upper left corner to start peeling. About five peels in, other players caught up. As my surplus letters piled up, I found a way to form them into words, and so I was the last to peel, leaving just two tiles in the bunch. I found a place for the last tile and clicked on the just-materialized banana icon in triumph.

The challenge is adjusting to the mouse control. As far as I can tell, there is no keyboard control. You can click on the letter you want and drag the tile to where you want it. You can also select many tiles by clicking on the table and dragging to form a selection rectangle.

You can then drag the group of tiles together. Also, immediately after selection a circle with a curved arrow in it appears near the group of letters. If you click on the circle, the group of tiles will rotate 90 degrees clockwise, like this:

Once learned, these tools would be useful when major grid-restructuring is necessary. Elite online Bananagrams players are probably separated by subtle mastery of the interface and selection/rotation tricks.

I can imagine that implementing the controls differently would make the game much easier. Imagine, for instance, that you click with the mouse where you want to place a letter and then type the letter that you want there. And then if you type the next letter in the word, it should automatically be placed, too.

From posts about surveys on gameplay, I suspect that the interface will be improving in the future. Aside from the interface issues, online Bananagrams resembles offline Bananagrams in one important regard: it is a addictive and quite fun.

---

Further reading: You might also enjoy reading my review of an online speed Scrabble game.

Also: tips on how to improve your Bananagrams performance and the longest word that you can make in Bananagrams.

The game of Snatch (a.k.a., Anagrams)

I recently learned a great game that can be played with the Bananagrams tiles. It is currently sold under the name "Snatch", but earlier versions actually pre-date Scrabble and, if the Wikipedia entry can be believed, has existed in some form since the Victorian era.

Like Bananagrams, it can be played with 2 to many players, but also like Bananagrams, it seems like (tentatively) 4 is the optimum number.

The object is simply to build words from the available tiles. Start with all the letters face down in the center of the table. One player starts turning over tiles until someone sees a combination of tiles that make a word (at least 3 letters long). They shout out the word and claim it. Then the next player starts turning over tiles. What makes the game interesting is that, even a word that have been claimed by a player can be snatched away if someone sees a way to combine all of its letters with one or more tiles from somewhere else on the table to make a new word. New words must have a different meaning. (You can't just use another form of the word. For instance, if someone has the word TONE, the variations TONES and TONED are not allowed. STONE, on the other hand, would be a legitimate snatch.) You can build off of your own words, and you can combine the letters from multiple words to form a single new one.

The rule that I really like is that, if you see a word, you can snatch it at any time. For example, Alice turns over a tile. Bob sees a word and snatches it. Your first reaction (from the paucity of options when the game first starts), is to wait for Bob to take his turn flipping tiles. But if you see a word, you can grab it immediately.

Ties: If Alice and Bob both call out words at the same time and the words share at least one tile, the conflict can be resolved by yielding to whoever has the longer word. You should make up your own house rule for when two players call out the same word (or words of equal length) at the same time. (One idea is to throw those tiles back into the pool.)

When all the tiles have been turned over, play continues until everyone decides that there are no more moves to make and quits. Scoring is completely arbitrary. I like counting the number of words, but admittedly, this penalizes for combining two of your own words to form one longer one.

You can play Snatch with Bananagrams tiles (which I call "Bananasnatch"), but you may find that there are a few too many vowels as the Bananagrams set is optimized for Bananagrams while the Snatch set is designed for playing Set. I threw out about 12 of the vowels and found that we had a pretty good game. Throwing out more may make the game steadily more challenging. I will have a more detailed analysis of the letter distributions in a forthcoming post.

After playing one round of Bananasnatch, everyone wanted to play again. It is tremendous fun! It's perfect for when you've played six or seven rounds of Bananagrams and you want to change things up a little bit.