Bananagrams is coming in new languages and for new platforms

A recent news article gives an overview of Bananagrams and describes many recent developments. Among the subtler changes, they now list as one of the official Bananagrams variations (like Banana Solitaire and Cafe), "Banana Challenge", which is just regular Bananagrams with the no-two-letter-words rule. In addition to the existing English and Spanish versions, Bananagrams translations are being developed for French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Hebrew. Board games are apparently big among Israelis:

...Bananagrams is popular with Hasidic Jews because they are unable to use numbers on the Sabbath. Since the game only utilizes letters, they can play without violating the Sabbath.

The article goes on to say that electronic versions of Bananagrams are in the works for the Wii, the Playstation, and "Gamebox" (which I am taking to be a mistaken transcription of either Game Boy or Xbox).

I'm very curious to see what the Wii interface for Bananagrams will be like.

UPDATE: French, Norwegian, German, and Italian Bananagrams are now available in their respective countries.

And (at last) you can buy the French version of Bananagrams through Amazon in the U.S.!:


I just learned that the Norwegian edition of Bananagrams has a product page on Amazon. But sadly, it is listed as "currently unavailable". Apparently, the additional Norwegian letters are Æ, Ø and Å.

Hebrew Bananagrams is still not available... For now, the closest approximation would be buying one of these kind of expensive Hebrew Scrabble sets and playing almost-Hebrew-Bananagrams. Shalom!
And Hebrew Bananagrams is now available, too.