It always amazes me how much a game can change when you change its scale. Today’s example: Jumbo Bananagrams.
Yes, it’s Bananagrams – your basic, Major Fun, Keeper-award-winning crossword-making word game. Bananagrams jumbofied, however, becomes a team sport. Because the letters are so large, and the game can take up so much more space, it becomes that much more engaging for the fortunate many.
Say, for example, that you’re playing Jumbo Bananagrams with the equivalent of 4 players. Given the sheer hugeness of it all, you decide to play with four teams instead – let’s say teams of 4 players each. So, now you have 16 people playing. You know how much of the table a normal regulation Bananagrams game can take up? Well, with Jumbo Bananagrams you can easily use a whole lawn, or living room, or basketball court. And each time a new letter is added, everybody on your team has to be involved in figuring out where to put it, how to rearrange the letters to maximize the manifest cleverness of it all. O, the excitement! O, the teamwork! And if you happen to have a business of some kind, with a staff in need of exploring their abilities to work together, or just to have fun together, well, now you have a near perfect team-building activity.
And, of course there are many, many other games that all these large (3×3-inch), floppy letters inspire. Can you, for example, toss them so they spell a word? Can you make a relay race? A mixer for a conference of perhaps 144 people (take a letter, any letter – OK, that’s your letter; now run around and find other letter/people with whom you can make an impressively large word, or a word that rhymes with Google maybe, or a palindrome potentially.
And, yes, teachers can use these for thinly disguised educational purposes, engaging an entire class in a literacy exercise or vocabulary exercise or just plain exercise. Jumbo Bananagrams being not just a game (an excellent game, in fact) but a tool for genuinely fun, real-time, all-embracing personal, family and professional growth.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/p1_eCwIj5Zg[/youtube]
Great idea. It reminds me of a game we played with a group of 100+ with playing cards. Each person got a playing card. The object was to form a group of five people with the best poker hand you could create. We debriefed around how with the right team, a low face value card could be a winning hand. We also talked about how it was to form and reform teams and what it was like to be left out. We also talked about the highest number of high value hands that could be formed. Usually the group result was less than the optimum. This pointed to the communication challenges in a larger group.
I think banagrams has more flexibility and power since you could ask for conference related terms and there could be many good ideas. Nice game. Lots of possibilities.
Yup. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much. See http://www.deepfun.com/human-cards/