You get 160 cards, total. Each player gets three cards. Each card has two categories on it – like: “Cannot take off” and “Leisure activities for old people.” Or “Things you secretly do at work” and “Famous sportsmen.” Or “Things that itch” and “Presents for mommy’s widdle puddy tat.” (Actual categories from actual cards.) You get an electronic timer you can set to 5 or 8 seconds. And you get a cloth bag that everything fits into very nicely.

It’s your turn to be Buzz Master. You pick any card, either category, and read it aloud. You start the timer. It beeps once. Everyone else takes a turn, each turn trying to come up with yet another example of the chosen category. Then the timer makes a polite, cymbal-crashing sound, and the card goes to whomever’s turn it is as a “token of failure.”

The round continues until everyone has used all their cards. Then a new round starts. On and on until all the cards have been played, the player with the fewest “failure tokens” having won.

You take turns being Buzz Master. The Buzz Master’s responsibilities are not only to select which of the two categories to use, but also to make sure the chosen category is in keeping with the general spirit of the crowd (Buzz It can be played by 2 to 10 players), and that responses are in keeping with the category. The Buzz Master may elect to make the categories more or less abstruse (e.g. “fictional sportsmen” instead of “famous sportsmen” ), or add more restrictions (things that itch beginning with the letter “b”). By artful selection and modification, the Buzz Master helps keep the game fun and helps the players avoid needing to resort to overly playful strategies (you could, if you wanted to, both hem and haw until the time was just about up, forcing the next player to take the “token of failure.”) Though the rules don’t specify it, it’s fairly obvious that when there are only two players, the Buzz Master answers questions as well as asks them.

OK, so the timer doesn’t “buzz.” It gongs. Which is a lot more pleasant, especially since it does so every 8 or 5 seconds (depending on the whim of the Buzz Master). And the box it comes in is cute, but flimsy. Which is also OK, because the bag works perfectly and for pretty much ever.

Buzz It, yet another of the surprisingly many games designed by Reiner Knizia, is most definitely a game you’ll want to take with you next time you have a family festival or you meet with a group of playful friends. It’s easy to learn. It is fast. It is funny. It is from Asmodee. It is Major Fun.

As promised in our review of PAIRSinPEARS, we review APPLETTERS, the second of the two new games introduced by the makers of the Major Fun award-winning Bananagrams.

We are once again presented with a fruit-like cloth bag, this one, true to its name, looking not like a banana, not like a pear, but everso clearly apple-like. Inside the bag: 110 letter tiles of similar quality to the Banagram tiles (ivory-like, pleasing to the touch and to the smushing around) but thick enough to stand on end, and a comparatively long two-sided rule sheetlet.

The first game described is APPLETTERS itself. It’s designed for 2-6 players, ages 5 and up. The tiles are placed face-down on the table, and then, in a process we have named “smush,” mixed around and around. Players each get 9 tiles.

The first player makes a word out of her tiles (as many as she can use) and places them in the center of the table. The next player then attaches another word, connecting the first or last letter of his word to either the first or last letter of the first player’s word so as to make two words, Scrabble-style. The next player adds yet another word. Note, however, that the words must create a chain, no tile touching more than two other letters. This results in an intriguingly different, and easier to play Scrabble-type game.

If a player can’t make a word, he picks three more tiles from the CORE (the smushed letters). And on and on until someone uses all her tiles, winning the game.

Apple Turnover is a bit more challenging, and designed for 2-4 players who are at least seven years old. There are two significant differences: each player gets 21 tiles, and, if a player can make a longer word, he can replace one of the opponent’s words and give him back his letters – causing a most satisfying moment of chagrin.

The third game is played for score. It’s called Apple Core. There are two mentally exacerbating differences. First, there are the 5-point bonus score possibilities: if your word is eight or more letters, or if your word is a palindrome (it can read backwards and forwards). Next, you can add your tiles anywhere – not just to the first or last letters of someone’s word, but also so the letters touch on multiple sides.

The APPLETTERS play experience is significantly different than the other Bananagram games. Here, you have to take turns. So the games tend to be longer, and more contemplative, and more challenging for the patience-impaired. But for those who like Scrabble, APPLETTERS is far more rewarding, and arguably more fun.

PAIRSinPEARS and APPLELETTERS are two new word games published by the producers of the Major Fun award-winning Bananagrams. Despite temptations to review them together (you’ll find them on the same page on the Banagrams site), they are each each different enough, and fun enough, to be worthy of a separate review. Hence, this.

Bananagrams, as you remember, comes in a banana-shaped cloth bag. PAIRSinPEARS comes in a pear-shaped bag. Like the banananess of Bananagrams, the pear-shaped bag is about as pearish as PAIRSinPEARS game gets.

Open your PAIRSinPEARS pear-shaped bag and you’ll find a set of rules, 4 complete sets of alphabet tiles, A-Z, each in a different pattern (hollow, filled in black, filled in with lines, filled in with dots) and the cutest ever teeny tiny magic slate.

PAIRSinPEARS is an excellent and engaging challenge for any word-lover. But parents and younger players will discover that the designers of PAIRSinPEARS have paid a lot of attention to how younger children could get involved. First of all, the tiles are larger, and easier for little fingers to manipulate than those you would find in the other Bananagrams games. Next, the entire first page of instructions is devoted to word recognition exercises designed specifically to help younger children become familiar with the properties of the tiles: spelling out someone’s name using two different alphabet sets, find matching pairs of vowels or consonants, putting three letters of each set in alphabetical order, making rhyming words, making homonyms.

Then there are two actual games described, both for 2-4 players, both taking less than 5 minutes per round. The main difference is that in the second game, you keep score.

The first game, eponymously named PAIRSinPAIRS, is designed for ages 5 and up. Players divide all 104 tiles between them and then race to be the first to complete a target number of pairs of intersecting words using matching tile patterns. The challenge is compounded by the scarcity of vowels. Since there are exactly four complete alphabets, there are only four of each vowel.

The challenge is as much to perception as it is to vocabulary. It’s amazing how difficult it can be to distinguish between stripe- and dot-filled letters, especially when you’re under pressure.

In the next game, PAIRPOINTS, for ages 7 and up, players not only have to create more word pairs, but they also have to consider score. Here’s where the magic slate comes in handy. Players can use any of the 4 kinds of letters, but they get twice the score when the letters are all of the same kind. This sets up a delightfully dissonant cognitive chord.

In addition to making words and distinguishing patterns, players have to decide when to go for the extra score or go for creating another pair. And even when they get all the pairs they need to end the round, they can choose to continue improving their score, making still more pairs.

Banagrams players might find PAIRSinPEARS especially appealing because, as in Banagrams, you don’t have to take turns.  PAIRSinPAIRS, however, is a clearly different game. It is just as much an invitation to highly focused word play as Bananagrams, but it offers a significantly different, though equally enticing challenge.

Say it’s your team’s turn, and you’re the one who has to try to get your team to correctly identify as many words as they can in the remarkably short time it takes the sand to travel from the top to the bottom of the timer.

You open up the convenient card storage and display case, take the top card and put it on the display thing, and you try to get your team to say, for example, “Bacon.” You can use as many words as you want, except for the list of “taboo” words appearing on the card, meaning, in this case, you can’t say “pig,” “eat,” “breakfast,” “sausage,” or “eggs.”

This is, to say the least, moderately disturbing. Just seeing the words on the card makes you want to say them. So you have to strain your poor brain, not only to hurry, but also to be careful. And then there’s this guy from the other team, sitting right next to you, not playing, but making sure you don’t, shall we say, “accidentally,” use one of the forbidden words.

Taboo is a party game. It can engage as few as 4 players and as many as 12. You get 504, two-sided cards. A sand timer, a AA-battery-powered buzzer, a card holder/display case, and a score pad. All you really need are the cards and the timer. But the rest add a certain gamish panache that do their bit to add to the fun of it all.

Since you’re trying to get your team to guess as many words as possible in the allotted time, you will find some comfort in knowing that you can pass, and some added discomfort in knowing that each card you pass on gives the other team  a point.

All in all, the game is very easy to learn, and simple enough to be easily adapted to the players and their playing styles. You can make it easier on the clue-givers (and a lot more happily hectic) by allowing two or more people on their team to work together. You can make it still easier by not taking points for every time the clue-giver decides to pass. And still easier, if you need, by giving each team more time. You can decrease the tension of competition by having players change teams every other turn. And, of course, you can increase the tension and competition just as easily

Though Brian Hersch may not have had these particular variations in mind when he designed the game, he did manage to create a game that can stand up to a lot of rule changes, generate a lot of hysteria as well as hysterical laughter, and, after more than 20 years, still be a party favorite.

A lot of the joy and fascination I experience from word games is a result of the inefficiency of the English language. So many spelling rules and irregular forms make for slippery, variable game play. The rules of the game can be simple and elegant because the sloppy kiss of language that we have received from our mother tongue (don’t think about that image too much) provides us with all the complication one could hope for in a life time.

Up for Grabs is a great example of how a game provides just enough structure to let us really play with our untidy language PLUS you get to mess with your opponents! What’s not to like?

As promised, the premise is simple. 100 letter tiles are face down. Players take turns flipping them over until someone spots a word. First person to shout out the word collects the tiles and players resume flipping over the tiles. But don’t get comfortable! Your words aren’t safe. Someone may steal one of your words if a new letter allows them to make a new word. For example, if you made the word “COT” and an L is revealed, I could call out “COLT” or “CLOT” and thus steal your word. The letters can be completely rearranged so if you have “PROD” and an O is revealed I could make “DROOP” thus proving myself the better lexicologist and a dirty rotten thief (or words to that effect, it was hard to keep track of all the epithets thrown my way during the course of the game.)

Players can also combine entire words into a new word. If you have “TART” and your neighbor has “SLED” I can combine them into “STARTLED” earning me several new and NSFW nicknames in the process.

It’s a busy, tricky, lively game. Especially if, like me, you are a sniveling word rat.

High marks to MindWare for design and packaging. This is a big game in a small box. The hexagonal box is small and efficient. The rules fit on a thin, tri-fold booklet with plenty of good examples. The tiles are small but colorful. My only gripe concerned the letters N, Z, W, and M because there was no under-line to indicate orientation. It was a drag to pause play while we figured out if I could use the letter to steal someone’s word. It slowed down how quickly I could be called something unrepeatable in mixed company.

I really like stealing words. Major fun.

Up for Grabs is © 2009 MindWare Holdings, Inc. under license from Excel Development Group, Inc.

Will Bain, Games Taster

Taking a game for adults and making it accessible for a younger audience is tough. You want to preserve the elements that made the original so fun for older players. You have to consider the cognitive development (and sometimes fine motor control) of younger children. You also want your game’s brand to carry through—someone (the parent with the money) should look at your game and say, “I love that game! I bet little whats-its-name will like this kids’ version too!” The wrong way to do it is to have your marketing department slap the game’s name and logo on a board with a spinner and hope the kids will be entertained by the random movement of colorful pieces. The right way to do it is like Word on the Street, Jr.

We reviewed the original Word on the Street a while back. It’s major fun. We wanted to see how Word on the Street, Jr. held up in comparison. Specifically, we wanted to see if the junior set would engage adults and children at the same time. Sound impossible for a word game? Sound like two great tastes that have no business being in the same kitchen let alone the same plate? THINK AGAIN!! It’s a hoot.

The rules: Word on the Street, Jr. has all the letters of the alphabet running down the center of the game board which depicts a street. Each letter is a tile. Two teams compete to see who can get the most letters on to their side of the street. Teams draw a card with a prompt, such as, “name of a vegetable” and then have 30 seconds to come up with a word that matches the category. The letters that spell the word are moved one space toward the team for each time they appear in the word. For example, “carrot” would move the C, A, O, and T one space but the R would move two spaces. Once a team moves a letter to their side of the street, the letter is out of play and can’t be moved the rest of the game.

The Junior version of the game includes the vowels (missing from the original) and the categories are a bit broader to accommodate developing vocabularies. Each category card has two sides, the blue side being a bit tougher than the green side.

I have only played the Junior version and it is plenty nerve-wracking. The 30 second timer keeps the game moving and the challenge is to come up with words that have lots of double or triple consonants. My eight-year-old enjoys playing with me and my wife (the adults play with the no vowels rule), but the most fun I had was in watching my daughter and her friends. The kids caught on to much of the strategy and gave their thinking muscles a work-out. Often they forgot that they were on different teams and volunteered their best responses to whatever category happened to be face up. They yelled. They laughed. They brought out their biggest words. In general, they acted like caffeinated jumping beans — which is a sure indication that major fun is afoot.

If you go to the Word on the Street site, and scroll down a bit, you’ll also find a downloadable form you can use to create your own additional cards for the game. This is major cool, because you can make the game engage players on so many more levels with categories like: “12-letter words,” “family members,” “chores,” “word in a Mylie Cyrus song.”

Original concept for Word on the Street, Junior by Jack Degnan. Copyright 2009, Out of the Box Publishing, Inc.

Will Bain, Games Taster

The classic word game Boggle (click to play online) has been repackaged. The game is the same, but it now comes in a sealed plastic case. You twist the case, expanding the cavity that holds the letter dice. You shake the case to make the letter dice change position. You twist the case the other way, the dice all snuggle into their new position, and the timer starts. All you need is paper and pencil. Everything else (even the battery) is included in one handy package (click on the demo tab to see how it works). So there’s nothing to lose – except the game.

There’s nothing new about the way the game is played, but the new package of this clearly Major FUN game is innovative enough to be worthy of our collective attention. Yes, it’s convenient, and could easily be classified as a “travel” game. But because there are no loose parts at all, it’s something more.

Of late, I’ve been holding many of my Games Tastings at the Irvington Library in Indianapolis. In addition to the Tastings, I’ve been donating some of our award-winning games to the library so we can start a small collection. The challenge, as you can imagine, is dealing with all the small parts. It takes a lot of dedication to make sure that a game comes back completely in tact. Boggle’s new packaging solves that problem beautifully. So exemplary is its design, that it has led me to create a new award category. For want of a better term (I was thinking of Ludotheque, which is French for public libraries devoted to games and play – why France, why don’t we have them everyhere, you might ask?), I decided to use “library.” It could mean school library, public library, club library, senior center library, even your own personal games library. But the point is, Hasbro has done something exemplary with its new rendition of Boggle – something that makes the game that much more accessible, especially to institutional environments, and hence, that much more worthy of appreciation and recognition.

Surfing my way, somehow, to a collection of Scrabble Variants, I learned about Clabbers which is a game of Scrabble, all right, but the letters can be in any order you want, as long as they are an anagram of a Scrabble-acceptable word. The author notes that “the board usually ends up tightly packed in places, and necessarily quite empty in others. Game scores will often be much higher than in standard Scrabble, due to the relative ease of making high-scoring overlap plays and easier access to premium squares.”

That’s all I needed to know: higher game scores, each word a puzzle in its own right. My kind of Scrabble.

Then there’s, of course, Dense Escalating Clabbers for the serious Clabbers-player. The Wikkipedist explains: “Dense Escalating Clabbers add 1/3 more tiles. In addition, every bingo increases a player’s rack size by one, and the play times are increased from 25 minutes to 33 minutes 33 seconds. There is also a 100 point bonus for playing a fifteen letter word. These modifications also make the game more challenging and interesting, and also increase the likelihood of triple-triple plays.” “Bingo” I deduce, having something to do with using all one’s tiles.

Then, apparently, there’s Volost. A “surreal game” says the Wikipedist, “where the only acceptable words are VOLOST and VOLOSTS.” I wasn’t really clear about what makes this variation worthy of our collective consideration until I read the last sentence in the article. “It is typically played late at night, and alcohol is usually involved.”

Ah. Alcohol. I should’ve known.

See also this great collection of potential Scrabble variants on Half-Baked.

Take all your consonants except for the ridiculous ones like Q, X and Z. Put them on your satisfyingly hefty bakelite tiles. Now, make a long game board, like a 4-lane highway with a divider strip just wide enough and long enough to accommodate all of your happily hefty letter tiles. Next, get together a deck of 216, often surprisingly laugh-provoking, double-sided category cards, like: “The Brand of Clothing Worn by One of the Players,” and “Something that is Wasted,” and “Something Used by Scuba Divers,” and “A Word that Describes a Car Crash,” “A Title Used for Males but not for Females.” Add a cardholder and sand timer. And those are all the ingredients needed for a new and notably Major FUN word game called “Word on the Street” from those frequently Major FUN game publishers, Out of the Box.

Everything, of course, except for the rules. And there in lies the tickle.

Designed by Jack Degnan to give a couple or a couple of teams of word-lovers ample opportunity to demonstrate their brilliance and/or befudlement, the game is a contest to see who, in 30 seconds, can think of a word that 1) fits the category, and 2) has as many as possible of the letters still in play, many of which are doubled – as in MISSISSIPPI which would allow us to move the M one lane closer to us, the P two lanes closer, and the S clear off the board, which would put us one letter ahead. Only 7 more to go and we win!

Though Mississippi would in deed be a coup, it would not be considered a valid response to the category “A Brand of Clothing Worn by One of the Players.” To which the best I could do at this time is probably MAIDENFORM (getting to move M twice as well as a D, N, F and R once). Or would MASSIMO with its two M’s and two S’s be better?

As the game progresses, different letters, and hence different words become more desirable, offensively or defensively, so the challenge keeps on changing. The best word might not have the most double letters in it if some letters only one space away from us, or more enticing yet, one space away from the opponent’s goal. The 30-second timer keeps the game moving apace. The cards keep the game surprising and funny. The tiles are large enough for all to read. The board works perfectly in directing player’s attention to the strategically most valuable letters. All this makes the game absorbing and delightfully tense, from the moment the first card is read until one team finally manages to capture the eighth letter.

Recommended for 2 to 12 players old enough to appreciate each other’s verbal mastery.

Bananagrams is a word game that uses letter tiles – 144 unusally finger-friendly, bakelite letter tiles. It will remind you of other letter-tile word games, many other letter-tile word games, until you actually read the rules (which are simple enough to summarize on the 1×2-inch tag that is attached to the banana-like zippable package).

Basically, you draw a bunch of tiles and try to assemble all of them into a crossword array. If you succeed, you draw more. That’s about it, basically-wise. The full rules are a bit more complex. Players all get the same number of letter tiles, the exact number depending on the how many are playing. They race to assemble all their letters into a crossword. As soon as one player succeeds, she calls “peel,” at which time every player has to take a another letter tile. And so it goes, on and on, until almost all the letter tiles are used up. Naturally, the first player to have used all her tiles shouts “bananas” (if she still has the presence of mind to remember), and wins the game.

Everything about Bananagrams is Major FUN, the quality of the tiles, the portability and storability, the adaptability and flexibility. Because the game is so simple to explain, it is also simple to change – to adapt to different skill levels, different environments and time constraints. Read, for example, Lance Hampton’s exemplary story of how he plays Bananagrams with his kids. We’re working on variations for teams, and maybe even cooperative versions.

If you like playing with words, it’s very likely that you’ll be taking a banana-case full of Bananagrams with you everywhere.