If you are looking to have some fun with friends on a game night, Bananagrams is an excellent option for you. Before you play though, you do need to know the Bananagrams Rules. The rules are rather straight forward — so don’t worry about it.

Bananagrams is a game you can play with two to eight players. The game starts with 144 tiles. You want to spread these out face down on a table. For up to four players, each player is going to take 21 letters,  face down. When playing with five to six players, each individual takes 15 letters, and with seven or more players, each player takes 11 letters.

Now, any player is going to say “Split” where all of the players turn their tiles over. When each player sees their letters they are able to start creating their own collection of intersecting words. This is going to look like a crossword puzzle in front of each individual. At this stage there are no actual turn between players. Each player is going to work on their words in order to use up as many of the letters as they can.

As the Bananagrams Rules state, once a player has used up all of their original letters, they say the word “Peel” out loud and take a tile from the remaining letters. At this point of the game, every other player must also take a tile from the bunch and add it to the letters they need to use.

If a player is unable to use a specific letter, they can return it to the bunch face down and then take three letters in return. If a player does this, they need to say “Dump” out loud in order to notify the other players, although this does not affect the other players.

Once a player is able to use up all the letters they say “Bananas” and they win the hand. It will be more fun if they actually also go “bananas.”

Like in Scrabble, you can challenge words, but there is no penalty for doing so. If a word is rotten, you call out “Rotten Banana” and remove it from play. If you are a fan of 90’s Disney movies, you might gleefully sing, “Asante sana Squash banana.”