A blog for fans of Bananagrams, word games, puzzles, and amazing things

Thursday, August 6, 2009

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.

Apparently, the additional letters in the Norwegian edition of Bananagrams 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.