Videos of the Omegathon Bananagrams tournament

A couple of short videos from the Bananagrams round of PAX East 2011 Omegathon have shown up on YouTube.

As I understand it, there were 24 Omeganauts at the beginning of the Bananagrams round and 12 after it. This suggests that each team played Bananagrams once and winning their match was essential to advancing.

The first video shows the beginning of a match between two teams.


Watching this video, you can see the difficulties in having two people work on the same grid, particularly at the beginning. The team that the camera spends most of the time on does a pretty good job of coordinating their grid formation verbally. Starting with the long word HASTILY was a smart move. Also, the first team was able to get off to a really fast start because they got an easy set of letters to work with. The other team had to contend with a J, a Q, and two Xs.

The second video anticlimactically cuts to when the match is already over, and there is some controversy over whether the word HASTILY is legal. It's not nearly as interesting as the first video, but I include it for completeness.

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Further reading:

• My previous post on the Bananagrams Omegathon round with photos and discussion of Bananagrams doubles