The past year has been an interesting one in the board-game world. Once I got over the thrill of figuring out which four- and six-player games can be played over Zoom, I discovered some new two-person games to play. Some were hits (Hive, Azul, Patchwork) others were flops (anything with many tiny bags of teeny pieces). The games I most enjoyed playing, however, were Scrabble and Bananagrams—two games involving square letter tiles and word making. Both were a welcome relief from a day crafting complete sentences.
What so fascinates me about these two games is how completely differently they are played. Scrabble requires an orderly taking of turns and tends to be contemplative and strategic. It favors the player with a huge or specialized vocabulary (and knowledge of those “only used in Scrabble” words such as jo, aa, xi), the ability to plan a few turns ahead, play defensively, and to exercise a degree of restraint. Over and hour (or three) players build off each others’ words on a gridded board. Once you lay down your tiles, there’s no picking them back up. Each word adds to the static connections of words on the board.
I learned to play Scrabble from my grandmother. She was an excellent player and quite patient. I can still hear her saying, “Oh, honey, you don’t want to put that there, do you?” when I would lay down an as ‘S’ or unwittingly set her up to play on the triple. My grandmother was a resourceful woman, having lived through the Pandemic of 1918, WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, a divorce, Vietnam, strokes, heart attacks, surgery, cancer, and likely many other woes she never mentioned. She always made the best of the hand she was dealt—in life and in Scrabble.
Bananagrams is exactly the opposite. It’s a high-speed, frantic, shouty, grabby game in which you do not build impressive high-scoring words on a board. You create your own words, one letter at a time, from a communal “bunch” of face-down letter tiles on the table/desk/floor in front of you. You do not wait turns. You just grab a face-down letter tile when someone/anyone yells “peel” (or “go” like we do because, it’s somehow quicker to say!) If you can make a word (even “a”), you shout “go,” and everyone takes another tile. The player to make the first two-letter word calls “go” and everyone grabs a tile. It goes on and on like this, with each player making words in a their own word grid and—here’s the part I love—breaking up the words and reshaping their word grid when needed to accommodate a new letter.
For instance, you’ve been able to make “U-N-I-T-E” out of your letters but then pick a “Q.” You don’t just sit there and wait for the letters that allow you to place the Q above the U and spell another word while everyone else’s hands are flying. You just bust up U-N-I-T-E, quickly rearrange your letters to spell Q-U-I-T-E and tuck the N beneath the I to spell “IN” and yell “go!” When a player grabs the last tile, they yell “I win.” If you are me, you fall back in your chair, wipe the sweat from your brow, and decide to play Scrabble to bring your blood pressure down.
What I love about Banagrams is that it helps you practice, flexibility, (healthy) detachment, open-mindedness, and spontaneity during the game and afterward. It’s all about speed and not getting attached to the words you’ve laid out, especially a long word to which you’ve connected many other words. If you get too focussed on holding on to that word, you’ll accumulate so many letters (as others are shouting “go”) that you can’t work into your grid. What to do? Let go! You have to bust up your big word—and thus much of your grid—and begin spelling out new words with you new (and existing) letters.
Over the past several months just thinking about Scrabble and Banagrams has inspired me to completely deconstruct the book I am working on only after spending the previous months feeling very commited to a structure that was obviously not working. Getting to the “break it up” moment took a while, but everything is coming back together nicely.
So, my fellow writers and all the problem solvers and “creatives” out there—find, borrow, buy these two games. If you live near Lacey, WA, find your way to Gabi’s Olympic Cards and Comics, which has pretty much every game on the planet though “game” isn’t part of their name.
Note: Though this blog appears under the “Washington Wild Swimmer” heading, the book I am currently working on is about a different kind of wild swimmer—a seabird known as the Pigeon Guillemot. This bird is the wild and crazy cousin of the Marbled Murrelet and I’m tinkering with a new form of natural history writing. Meanwhile, I am swimming weekly in a local lake (in what we call “bioprene”—no wetsuit) and thinking about what stories to tell about Washington’s glorious lakes.