Bananagrams is one of my favorite games. Each player starts with a random collection of letters on little tiles, and you make as many intersecting words as possible. When you use all your tiles, you say “PEEL!” and every player has to draw additional tiles from a common pile. It’s kind of like Scrabble, but without a board.
There is a pressure to get all your tiles used quickly, on legitimate words, so they you don’t fall behind the other players and end up with a bunch of tiles and no place to put them.
In Bananagrams, you can take apart your words and re-form them as much as you like, as long as all the resulting words are still words. Sometimes you realize you have painted yourself into a corner, and the puzzle you’ve made doesn’t leave you enough places to add new words. In this moment, you have two choices.
You can keep moving your tiles around, making “its” and “had” and never being able to use up your tiles.
Or you can start over. At this point, what you’ve done in the past doesn’t matter. The fact that you started out with “exhibit” and then got “taro” and “buoy” is the sunk costs of Bananagrams. Now the only way forward is by putting your hands on all the letters and swooshing them around to mix them up.
Now, though, you can actually see what you’re working with. Each letter is an asset now that it’s separated from the others, as you can look at what it has to offer differently.
Are you playing with a limited hand? Are you looking at all the possibilities? Are you assuming you can’t do anything with this random “J” and “X” just because it doesn’t fit in what you already laid out? What happens if you get in there and mix it all up?
P.S. I have been playing Bananagrams for like ten years, and it was not until I sat down to write this post that I got the pun in the name.
