Banana headache

We got a new game a while ago that has quickly turned into Joe's favorite, favorite meaning there are few games he hates more. It is called Bananagrams. It is like Scrabble, only there is no board, and the letter tiles come in a cute little bag in the shape of a banana. Joe accuses me of buying the game mainly for this reason. "Taken in by a fake banana," he mutters.

I freely admit to being taken in by the banana packaging, but another big draw -- and if you are a Scrabble player you will know what I mean -- is that you get a lot of tiles to make words with. With four players you get 17 tiles. With three players you get 21 tiles. I was in heaven. 21 tiles! Instead of being limited to words like anger, you could make beautiful, exhilarating, gastrocnemius...practically all in the same round.

There is a very important difference between this game and conventional Scrabble, however. There are no points. Since you build your own little grid of words, the first person to use up the tiles wins. This is a definite drawback to Scrabble lovers for whom racking up points is like feasting on blood. But -- 21 tiles! I couldn't resist.

My sister played with us the first time. I looked at my 21 tiles in rapture. Should I make kinkajou? Perhaps katzenjammer? I was busy figuring out whether I could make thermoluminescence when my sister announced she had won. We stared at her. Neither of us had made more than half a word yet.

Then I looked at her tiles, which read like a toddler's daily log of conversation:

no
dog
hi
go
mine
moo

"What's this?" I demanded. " 'Moo??' " I'm making thermoluminescence and you put down moo??"

"But I went out first, so I won," she said smugly.

We declared a rematch. But we might as well have been challenging Michael Phelps to a race in the butterfly. I just could not bring myself to make moo when I could make zeptosecond instead. We all shaved a little bit of time off, but so did she, until her words had gone from toddler to infant status: I, oh, um, eh.

Finally we called a halt, defeated. She was unbeatable. The lure of 21 tiles and carpophagous had no power over her.

Now whenever someone suggests playing Bananagrams, we just look at each other and say, soberly, "moo."