Nicky and Kate introduced us into one of the most entertaining games I’ve played for a while – Bananagrams – whilst we were down the coast a couple of weekends ago. A sort of free-form scrabble, you form a scrabble grid of words (without a board) with however many letters you are allocated – 21 in a short-handed game (2-4 players). When you complete the grid, you shout ‘peel’ and everyone takes another letter from the face-down pile in the middle and you try to fit it into your grid somewhere, often having to restructure swathes of it. If you can’t place a letter, you can ‘dump’ it in exchange for three new letters from the central pile.

The winner is the first to complete the grid once the central tile repository has been exhausted and shout ‘bananas’. Sub-games include longest word, min/max word length, thematic consistency to all words, sentences, rude word construction and so on.

Addictive in the extreme, and only £8.49 from Amazon! Stocking filler-tastic.