BANANAGRAMS Appletters: Race to Build A Word Worm in This Board Game for Kids

My students will love using this game in my class!

This was a fun game for our son, who's moving from kindergarten into first grade. It's basically Scrabble without a board, and it teaches kids to form words from a bank of letters. The pieces are lightweight cardboard, so they tend to shift around while playing. I wish theh were slightly heavier or that they somehow locked together. That said, the price is affordable and I do feel like it's both fun and educational as it is.

Thousands of American families have played Bananagrams, since that board-free variation on Scrabble was released in 2006. Since then, lots of school and even pre-school programs have made that game available to kids to encourage them to "play with spelling." Our family owns a set and has enjoyed the challenge over the years. The big difference with Appletters is that everyone plays on the same word string. Classic Bananagrams challenges players to make their own word chains or grids from the tiles they receive. Instead, Appletters is a more cooperative game, building on the same single pattern of words in the middle of the table. According to the rules, there will be a "winner," the person who uses up their tiles first. However, as we have introduced the game with our youngest grandchildren, we play it more as a "cooperative game" in which the goal is for all of us to use all the tiles. It's easy to adapt the rules from a single winner to the goal of a group win, if you want to do as we have done. We're happy with this, especially for younger grandchildren, because it's less solo focused and more aimed at seeing what can emerge between all of us in the center of the table.

Loved that it was kind of like a junior scrabble. Got it for a mom and almost 6 year old. But it was hard to understand. The child expected more of a "apple and worm" idea out of it. It's really just punch out letters. You could probably make your own game out of letter tiles. Not worth the money.

Many years ago we picked up Bananagrams and we've loved it since. Figured we would give this one a try as well and see how it goes. Each letter had to be punched out and some sort of tore, but it does have 200 of them. In Bananagrams each letter is a nice plastic sturdy thick durable tile, and depending on the version you can have up to 288 tiles and the are easy to flip over being that they are thick plastic. These are a bit more to work with. In this game you build upon one word, and keep adding to the end of it making it a word worm. In the Bananagrams game you build your own words individually on your own tile layout that must touch each word using a letter, think Scrabble, but kid friendly edition. Either way both games are uniquely fun, and my daughter and I had and a great time playing them. Comes with a set of 4 dividers for each player to hide their work temporarily.