Tasso Banana Review

boardgamequest.com:

Bananas. They are long, yellow, and delicious. Here are some fun facts about bananas according to my random googling:

OK, so why is this crazy person spouting random banana facts at you? Well, sometimes we reviewers struggle to come up with interesting intros, so we need to get creative… or stupid. You be the judge. In either case, today we are going to talk about Tasso Banana, a stacking game from 25th Century Games.

Each player starts with an identical number of bananas with the goal of being the first player to get rid of all of theirs. On a player’s turn, they can place a banana anywhere on the board with a few restrictions:

Congrats! You now know how to play Tasso Banana.

Sometimes, as reviewers, we ask publishers for games that catch our eye that we want to cover. Other times, things randomly show up at our doorstep that we were not expecting. That was the case with Tasso Banana. But, frankly, I love dexterity games so I was willing to give it a shot.

The production values are quite well done. The wooden banana tokens look nice, but the most interesting part is that the box folds out into the game board. With a magnetic closure, it was a pleasant surprise to have everything all in one neat little packet. The rules are on the inside of the box, the board is there, and I just use a bag to hold the bananas.

And you know what, darn if the game isn’t pretty fun. The rules are a bit quirky in that bananas can only touch other bananas when you are stacking them, and each banana can only support 1 banana. So it leads to a bit of a game of chicken as the players take their turn.

At the start of the game, you are pretty much just placing a banana on the board as far from other bananas as possible. You don’t want to be the one to give the next player a stacking opportunity. But eventually, space starts to run out and players will need to get creative. You start placing bananas slightly hanging over the edge, super close to another banana that’s already supporting gone,