“Peel”

I was sitting Tuesday afternoon at a Starbucks answering email and doing some other work and every few seconds someone at a table near me would shout, “Peel.”

This would be disconcerting to many, I suppose, but to us initiates, it was musical. Bananagrams was in the building.

A year and a half ago, our friend Robin at Funtoysia, a store I should never approach without surrendering my credit card to someone wise and trustworthy, recommended a new game called Bananagrams. Being a sucker for games and trusting her recommendations, I laid down one of my best spent $14.95 ever. This has become a Greenwald family favorite game.

Shortly thereafter, we took it with us on a visit to family in Cincinnati, and for hours on New Year’s Day there was a continuous game being played at my sister’s family room table.

Bananagrams is a word game played with Scrabble-like tiles. The object is to take a set number of tiles and create interlocking words, much like would occur on a Scrabble board, except that every player is creating his own ‘board’. The winner is the one who uses the last available tile. If you can spell, you can play.

It’s most endearing feature is its banana shaped package. It’s pure marketing genius.

We’ve found that it can even be a multilingual game. My son-in-law speaks very little English. So, when he’s played with us, we simply allow him to create his words in Spanish. (I believe, though, that he cheats – using words from two languages at once just is not playing fair.)

Bananagrams is $14.95 wherever you buy it. So I suggest that those in the Bradenton-Sarasota area find their way to Funtoysia and pick it up there. Tell them ‘Randy’ sent you and they’ll, well, they won’t do anything, really. But tell them anyway!

Oh – what does ‘peel’ mean? Buy the game and you’ll find out. Or ask the next guy you see playing it at Starbucks.

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Where did the game originate? Ask CNN.

Embedded video from CNN Video