Zip-It and Oh-Spell!: Two new games from the makers of Bananagrams

The makers of Bananagrams unveiled their latest creations at the American International Toy Fair this month.

Zip-It is a two player game in which each player gets 12 letter cubes (dice with letters on all sides) and then has to assemble them into a grid of words as quickly as possible. The first to finish their grid says "Zip!" and scores one point. You can keep track of the score by incrementing the two zippers built into the bag for the game pieces.

Coincidentally, I have been recently thinking that it would be neat to make a game with letter cubes, like in Boggle, except that the player would get to choose which side to use. The cube aspect of Zip-It is tantalizing. Imagine playing Bananagrams with letter cubes. I imagine that there might be a lot of head-tilting to look at cubes from the sides. If you don't like one of the face-up letters, you could just rotate it until you found a letter that you liked. But is that the fastest method? I really want to play this right now and find out!

Oh-Spell! is the first card game from Bananagrams International. It sounds somewhat like Quiddler in the sense that the cards have letters rather than numbers, and the objective is to form words. There is a twist involving the cards having suits... It's not yet clear how that will play into the game. And I have a suspicion that rather than making separate words, players will form a word grid from the cards in their hand. But at this point, that's just a rumor (which I started because I think it will make a cool game).

I will report back when I have more details on these games.

Zip-It and Oh-Spell! should be available in a few months.

UPDATE: OK, these games were not released by the summer, as I had expected. Oh-Spell has been delayed indefinitely, but Zip-It is now out. Get it while it's hot!

Some Bananagrams puzzles

I found a neat kind of Bananagrams puzzle that I have never seen before. Explaining them might give away that step of discovery, so I will just link to three examples:

• puzzle #1


• puzzle #2


• puzzle #3

I have a solution for the last one, and I think I know how to solve the second one, though it's not really my style, so I made my own variation:



If you want a rather significant hint to how to approach these puzzles, I suggest looking at this post and this one.

Enjoy!

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.

Some more of the Official Scrabble Dictionary's greatest mistakes

After posting my essay describing the many problems with the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD), I discovered that I am not the only one who has issues with the official Scrabble word lists. An article from the Times of London reports that the official Scrabble word list has come under increased criticism, arguing that the popularity of online Scrabble games has brought players of different positions on this issue into conflict.

The article points out that there is a Facebook group called "The Official Scrabble Dictionary: Winner or Whack?" which appears to be a venue for people to debate the merits of the OSPD. The group has 20 members at present, so the remarkable thing is not that there are some people who have complaints, but that those complaints are being heard. In the UK, the analog of the OSPD is called "Official Scrabble Words" (OSW). The first version of this British Scrabble word list was compiled by Allan Simmons (Scrabble columnist for the Times) and Darryl Francis in 1988. They still maintain the list. Simmons was interviewed in the article:

Mr Simmons is in favour of a wide variety of words, but he believes that archaic words should be removed from the list. "There are lots of archaic, obsolescent words that came from Chambers dictionary. That's not good for trying to promote Scrabble in schools. One of the words that annoys me is 'smoyle', an old form of 'smile'. Nobody is going to spell 'smile' that way now."

In a separate opinion piece, Simmons gives an overview of the situation, concluding that:

We, in the driving seat of the Scrabble community, should be letting go of the archaic word baggage in the interest of a more publicly acceptable word list. We should have a cleanout of all the spellings of ye olde literary works that are no longer in use.

So it sounds like word list reform may be coming to Britain. Whether this will mean changes to the word lists used in America remains to be seen. If dictionary reform is not imminent, we could always organize a demonstration. After all, who could pass up the opportunity to be part of a Million Banana March?

The longest word that you can make in Bananagrams

How long can a word constructed from the tiles in a Bananagrams set be? I decided to find out.

"Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" is sometimes referred to as the longest English word. It now seems that this word was invented by the National Puzzlers' League as a hoax since the first instance of it ever appearing in print is in a 1935 newspaper article:

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers' League at the opening session of the organization's 103d semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker. The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust...

A book called Wordplay: A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities tells the rest of the story:

Frank Scully, author of a series of puzzle books and later one of the early UFO enthusiasts, read the newspaper article and repeated the word in Bedside Manna: The Third Fun in Bed Book (Simon and Schuster, 1936, p. 87). On the strength of this citation, League members (with a wink from the editors?) got the word into both the OED Supplement and Webster's Third. There it remains even to this day.

Whether it really counts as a word or not is moot since it would require 6 C tiles which is 3 more than are in a Bananagrams set. (See this post for a table of the letters in a Bananagrams set.)

"Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is a nonsense word from a song in the 1964 Disney movie Mary Poppins. In the movie, it is defined as a word to say when you don't know what to say. It is listed in some dictionaries, but only as a proper noun (i.e., the name of the song).

"Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism" is an unusual word because of the double "pseudo". It looks like a double negative, but it's really not. Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism is so called because it seems like pseudohypoparathyroidism in that both are disorders resulting in symptoms such as inadequate skeletal growth and shortness, but pseudohypoparathyroidism is caused by resistance to calcium and phosphorus, while pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism is not. Regular hypoparathyroidism is caused by malfunction of the parathyroid glands resulting in low levels of parathyroid hormone and as a consequence, low levels of calcium and phosphorus in the blood. It's a real word, if a highly technical one. However, the word "pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism" requires more P tiles than we have.

Which brings us to the frivolous little word "floccinaucinihilipilification". It appears to have been coined in the 18th century by Eton College students who combined a bunch of Latin roots, each meaning "nothing" or "insignificant". Floccinaucinihilipilification was defined to be the act of judging something to be worthless. (This is a typical example of 18th century college student hijinks, right up there with herding cows into campus libraries and taking apart the dean's mini-steamboat then reassembling it in someone's dorm room.) It's kind of a beautiful word. Too bad we are one C short of being able to spell it.

And so finally we arrive at "antidisestablishmentarianism", the long word you've all been waiting for. During the 19th century, the issue of whether the Church of England should be the the state church of Britain was a contentious one. The movement favoring disestablishment of the state church was referred to as "disestablishmentarianism", and the counter-movement was called "antidisestablishmentarianism". It can actually be spelled with one set of Bananagrams tiles, is generally recognized as a real word, and is therefore (by my estimate) the longest possible word in a Bananagrams game.

Words like "antidisestablishmentarianism" are agglutinative constructions. English allows such limited use of such constructions, like when combining Latin roots to form words. Forming words (even new words) by agglutinative combination is so common in the German language that there effectively is no longest German word. And in fully agglutinative languages like Turkish, extra word parts can be added on to a base word to a much greater extent. Whereas in German, nouns are routinely extended into much larger nouns, in an agglutinative language, entire sentences can be built up from one long, space-free string of letters. Word games must be very different in Turkey!

So there you have it. A tour of the forces that push words beyond their normal lengths: hoaxes, pranks, politics, medical jargon, and musicals.

I will leave you with some really long words:



counterrevolutionaries



and, of course,

SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS!

Play online Bananagrams and you might possibly win Bananagrams prizes

According to this press release, there is a contest running from now through February 12th, 2010 where, if you play Bananagrams online and attain certain levels of achievement, it is possible to enter into a drawing for an actual prize.

Depending on the day, you either have to play Solo Café Bananagrams (the one where you get all 21 tiles at the start with no peeling) or actual Bananagrams games against other online opponents.

Here's exactly what you have to do to be entered into the drawing:

From January 25th through January 29th, if you finish a game of Solo Café Bananagrams in less than 40 seconds, you are entered into the drawing for that day. (You can qualify once per day.)
From February 1st through February 5th, you have to win more than 12 Bananagrams games (in one day) against other players to qualify for that day.
And from February 8th through February 12th, you have to finish one game of Solo Café Bananagrams in less than 35 seconds.

You can play on any of the four venues for online Bananagrams (the iPhone app, Facebook, MySpace, or Bebo).

The information posted on Facebook on the first week of the contest indicated that ten copies of the Bananagrams book will be awarded for the first week of competition as well as one copy of the Bananagrams iPhone app. Probably the prizes will be the same for the remaining three weeks.

Good luck!

A Bananagrams match built for two: Thoughts on playing N-player Bananagrams

If you have ever played a 2-player game of Bananagrams, you know how much different it is that a regular game with 4 or 5 players. A 2-player game feels like a marathon and requires a lot of endurance. Playing longer games is a good way to build up and learn to maintain your focus.

For my casual play, the adaptation that I often use is to divide the regular pool of tiles in two, put half of them back in the banana, and play with just the other half. That way, each player winds up with the same number of letters in their grid as in a regular 4-player game (which is, for some reason, my standard). But you can wind up with asymmetric halves, so it's best to switch between the two halves, or else mix them together and split them periodically.

Conversely, 8-player games are like a 100 yard dash: You have to go as fast as you can, and just as coming out of the starting blocks as quickly as possible is critical for winning a short race, a small advantage in the initially drawn set of tiles can make all the difference when playing Bananagrams. Generally this results in more random outcomes than longer matches, but I like to view many-player matches as a challenge to my ability to play fast.

Of course, a big factor in why 8-player games go so fast is that they split the same 144 tiles up such that each player only has to make an 18-tile grid. Contrast that with the 36-tile grids in a typical 4-player game. A solution to this is mixing together two sets of Bananagrams (which explains the introduction of the Bananagrams Jumbo and Double Bananagrams sets which (as I understand it) both consist of two bananas sold together, giving a total of 288 tiles.) I've never tried playing a many-player game with two sets of Bananagrams. I would definitely like to see how different that format feels. I suspect that it would still be a bit faster than a 4-player, 1-banana game.

When it comes to the most fiercely competitive situations, like tournaments, some multi-player games such as Scrabble seem to converge to 2-player games. The argument is that this minimizes the influence of chance and allows the players' skills to maximally determine the outcome of the game. This does not hold for other games, like Settlers of Catan which does not work well with only two players (requiring a minimum of three), in part because player interaction is an important component of gameplay. Consequently it, and other so-called Eurogames, are probably not suitable for Bananagrams-style acceleration (a.k.a., Banananification).


Bananagrams is a wonderfully flexible game that can scale to small or large groups, and the feel of the game can be altered by increasing or decreasing the number of tiles per player. There must be many other ways that the game can be changed a little, giving it a different texture while maintaining its core Bananagrams nature. I hope to find and explore such ways in future posts.