Wild Word Games

Summer feeling looooooong? Here are three crazy word games to occupy minds young and old.

Bananagram Poetry

This game works just like Bananagrams (or Speed Scrabble if you play with Scrabble tiles instead of the nifty little banana bag), but after all the game is over there is one more step: everyone moves one place to the left and writes a poem or story using every one of the words in the game in front of them. It is creativity-inducing, sometimes hilarious, and encourages people to leave the cool words in when they are moving their tiles around. Fun with kids or adults.

Don't Finish the Word

In this game, the first player says a letter out loud and players take turns adding a letter to begin forming a word. The catch is, if you say the last possible letter that could make a word from the letters that have been building, then you lose.

For instance, the first person might say K, someone might add I, then N. That spells "kin" but no one is out, since someone can add a D to spell "kind." Since someone else could add an E or an N for "kindergarten" or "kindness" then the game keeps going on until there is nothing that can be tagged on, ending with "kindergarteners" or "kindnesses." Whoever has to say that last S loses. Or have I missed something? This is a great game for the car.

Best Blank

This game is like Apples to Apples, but without pre-made cards. One person gives a prompt. This could be an adjective like in Apples to Apples or it could be a whole sentence. For instance, the prompt could be "wintery" or it could be "Yum! That's my favorite!" Or anything even crazier your loved one's brains invent.

Then everyone else writes the best response they can think of on a slip of paper. It could be something accurate, or something funny. It could be an inside joke, or something just plain weird -- whatever they think the prompter will like best.

The prompter reads all the possible answers and picks the best one, whatever that means to them. The person who wrote that answer gets a point, and the prompting rotates to a new player.