Bananagrams is the UK’s best-selling game since 2000

Word game Bananagrams is the best-selling non-digital game of the last 16 years on Amazon’s UK website, the online retailer has revealed.

For those who have somehow never encountered the game, which launched in 2008, it’s essentially Scrabble without a board. Players each have their own collection of letters and everyone takes another piece from a central pool each time a player uses all of their letters up. The first person to have interconnecting valid words and zero letters left in either their hand or the middle wins.

Interestingly, the relatively modern game has outsold its word game predecessor, Scrabble, as well as other family staples such as Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Articulate and dice-rolling-game-only-with-tiny-plastic-swine Pass the Pigs.

You’ll likely be disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that no ‘proper’ board games were on the list, although fast-paced kids observation game Dobble did manage to creep into the rankings.

Bear in mind that Amazon counts toys alongside games, so many of the higher-up slots were taken by firm favourites such as the Rubik’s Cube, a doll of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen, Harry Potter Lego and the Thunderbirds Tracy Island. Honestly, don’t kids watch Blue Peter and make their own Tracy Islands anymore?

One recent addition is Hasbro’s game-cum-torture device Pie Face, which involves players putting their head through a hoop and turning a crank a number of times Russian roulette-style to see if cream gets catapulted into their eyes/nose/mouth. The game was only released last year, which probably says a lot about the state of the world at the moment.