Abraham Nathanson, Rest in Peace

PrincessFroglips sums up our feelings perfectly, in this photograph, "Bananagrams Memorial Game Luncheon" (from Flickr).

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.

Scrabble reformers: W*W*S

Last month, the Scrabble world was briefly rocked by news reports saying that a new version of Scrabble would allow proper nouns to be used as words. (It doesn't take much to rock the Scrabble world.) These stories turned out to be false. Actually Mattel is just introducing yet another of its many tangential spin-offs of Scrabble - in this case, a game called "Scrabble Trickster". But the resulting outrage serves as a good illustration of how passionate people are about defending the standard rules of Scrabble.

And then there are those on the other side of the spectrum, who believe that something is wrong with Scrabble and that it needs to be fixed. And they have come up with some delightfully crazy solutions.

Discontent with the word-memorization and short words that optimum Scrabble strategy requires, Peter Roizen came up with two small changes that totally transmogrify Scrabble into something else. First, he got rid of the blank tiles (which can stand for only one letter) and added in twelve wildcard tiles (which can represent long strings of letters). So, for example, the word

TRANSMOGRIFY

could be spelled

TR*M*Y

Unlike blank tiles, when building off of the wildcard tiles in the other direction, they can again stand for any sequence of letters desired by the player. And the second change he made was to add wildcard squares to the board. When placing a word that includes one of the wildcard squares, any tile can be placed on the wildcard square, turned over so it looks like a blank, but still functions like a wildcard.

An extra twist is that the player placing the tiles does not have to immediately reveal what the wildcards stand for. The opponents then have to decide whether to challenge the word, based on whether they believe the first player really knows a word that matches the wildcard pattern. Therefore, bluffing and pattern matching play a large role in this game.

The main effect of the wildcards is to break the game open, so rather than being dominated by short words, the board becomes covered in long words (albeit, long words that tend to be represented by 5 or 6 letters and some wildcards).

The web site for the game is filled with amusing discussion and digressions on Scrabble and WildWords.

There is also a free computer version of WildWords for computers that run on the Windows operating system. It allows people on different computers to play together.

The obvious question now is, what effect would including either blanks or wildcard tiles have on Bananagrams play? My guess is that both tiles would just make Bananagrams go faster. But it might be interesting to mix them in to balance other variations that tend to slow down the game to get a game with different strategy while maintaining Bananagrams speed.

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.

Bananagrams writing contest

The Newport Review is an online magazine which publishes creative writing, poetry, photography, and other visual art forms. They sponsor an annual writing contest, and this year the competition has a Bananagrams theme. Between May 1 and September 30, 2010, entrants can submit either a poem (<=21 lines) or a short story (<= 2100 words). The catch is that a Bananagrams grid made up of 21 tiles will be posted on the Newport Review site, and every word in that grid has to appear in the submitted story or poem. It's sort of a form of constrained writing. (More severely constrained forms of writing were described in my post on word game poetry.) You can read some of the previous contest winners to get a sense of what the Newport Review might be looking for.

Also, it is useful to note that links to information about two of the judges have been given: John Landry, a poet, and Jincy Willett, writer of fiction and blogger of blogs. Jincy Willett clearly has a sense of humor which gives me hope that any entry I might happen to submit might not be immediately dumped (as it were).

Check the site for full details on the contest. Prizes include a $500 cash award (donated by Abraham Nathanson), publication in the Newport Review, and, of course, Bananagrams sets. There is also a per-submission entrance fee of $7. Void where prohibited. Do not bend, fold, spindle, or mutilate this blog.

Good luck!