Wooden toys are meant to be fun. But ask anyone who has attempted to build a tower out of Jenga blocks, only to see it collapse in a heap, and they’ll tell you it is one of the most nerve-jangling, bewildering, bemusing and bamboozling games they’ve ever played. And therein lies much of its appeal. It’s no surprise, therefore, that toy retailers say that Jenga is one of their most popular products.
Jenga is relatively new compared to many other world-famous games on the market. It was created by Leslie Scott, the co-founder of Oxford Games, and based on a game that her family developed while living in Ghana in the early 1970s. Scott is a British National who was born in the British-administered territory of Tanganyika where she grew up speaking English and Swahili, before moving with her family to Ghana, West Africa, where Jenga was born; the name Jenga is derived from the Swahili word kujenga, which means ‘to build’.
The family bought children’s wooden building blocks from a local sawmill and the game evolved into what we know and love today. A tower of 54 hardwood blocks is built and once complete, the person who stacked the tower plays first. Basically, the game consists of a player taking one block on their turn from any level of the tower (except the one below an incomplete top level) and carefully placing it on the top level in order to complete it. The game ends if any block falls from the tower (other than the block a player moves on a turn) or, more satisfyingly, the tower falls completely. The loser is the person who made the tower fall so, as a matter of fact, the winner wins by doing nothing.
Jenga was officially Introduced to the public at Harrods department store in London in the early 1980s and launched in North America in 1986. It has since become an international bestseller and is popular with kids and adults alike. It has been estimated that over 90 million Jenga games have been sold worldwide – that’s the equivalent to more than 4.86 billion Jenga blocks. Jenga was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in November 2020 and it’s fair to say that few other inductees are as infuriating and nerve-tingling as this one.
Incidentally, if you have designs on building the world’s highest Jenga tower then you have some work to do. The record for the tallest tower is 40 complete stories with two blocks into the 41st. This was claimed way back in 1985 by Robert Grebler of the United States. There’s a nice touch of symmetry about this because Grebler built the tower while playing with an original Jenga set produced by Leslie Scott in the early 1980s. As any experienced Jenga player will tell you, symmetry in this game is a rare thing indeed.
