![]() ![]() ![]() It's thrilling when you're teetering at 30 layers already. So on one hand it could be considered a very competitive game, on the other hand, there’s actually quite surprisingly cooperative play involved. Nobody deliberately wants it to fall over. The excitement comes in trying to get it as high as possible. They really want it to get high, so it becomes almost like a team effort, in a funny way. But if you watch people playing, once the tower gets beyond a certain height, most people end up wanting it to get higher. And it's terrifying it when it comes back to you.Īlso, I didn't deliberately intend it to be a cooperative game. When you start the game you could make exactly the same moves, but it's not going to end up in the same way because of the randomness. There's nothing inevitable about who's going to win. It still seems to require skills, but they're not skills that take a lifetime to learn. I think it appeals because you can play it with anybody - as long as you've got a certain amount of dexterity. What do you think is Jenga’s enduring appeal? There's that tactile element to it, but it's also actually key to the functioning of the game. I haven't seen how Hasbro make them now in vast quantities, but I understand it's not that different. It smooths the edges, but it doesn't smooth them totally - it introduces another level of slight inconsistency, so it's really clever. When you very lightly tumble polish it puts a nice sheen on them. They came up with this idea of tumble polishing them. I went up and saw them and asked if they would be interested in doing this for me? And they said, “Yes”, provided that if it became successful, I took it elsewhere to be manufactured because they didn't want to spend the rest of their lives just churning out hundreds and thousands of the wooden blocks! They had already been making wooden toys, and a person that I knew at Oxfam suggested talking to them. In Yorkshire they have a farm, they've got a dairy, but they also have a woodworking shop. It's a sheltered community for adults with learning disabilities and other special needs - it's a movement all around the world. The next stage was introduced by a group of people in Yorkshire at a place called Camphill. So these planks of wood would go through that template, and then be chopped up into the pieces. He came up with a very clever suggestion, which was to send the planks of wood through a sanding template that was not in itself 100% even. I spoke to a carpenter I knew and asked him how would you do this. How did you scale up production to maintain randomness? You start with 18 rows and it just worked - I don't think there was anything more scientific. The decision to go for 54 blocks was trial and error. So you can start with a fairly stable tower. That meant you couldn't assemble them three by three and make a stable tower to start with - there were gaps between each.īut I figured out that if you made them just slightly shorter you can square it up. The original ones were slightly longer than Jenga blocks are now. Then there was the question of how many actual blocks there should be, plus their size. I had to figure out how to mass market some of these flaws. So that sort of randomness was a factor of the original, handmade wooden blocks. If they're all identical it just sits there. Because without that, the game just really doesn't work. Not many people realise this but each one of the blocks in the game are slightly randomly different from each other. But I was just so convinced this was going to work. I knew nothing about the toy industry and nothing about retail business. So in 1982, I decided I was going to take this game to market. People and children have obviously been piling up blocks of wood for years, but actually to turn that into a game, it just didn't exist. But it took a long time for the penny to drop that this didn't exist already as a game. I played a lot with friends here in Oxford. They weren't exactly like the Jenga blocks are now but the principle of the game was there. I moved to Oxford a few years later and had a set of these blocks and started to play it as a game. Science Blog caught up with Leslie Scott, to find out how the game evolved and why its simple concept keeps people coming back for more.Īs a game, it evolved amongst my family when we were living in Ghana in the mid-70s. Sold in 117 countries across the world and loved by all ages, as a family- and pub-favourite, Jenga is now officially a classic. This month Senior Associate of Oxford’s Pembroke College, Leslie Scott, was honoured by her wildly popular invention Jenga being inducted in the US’s National Toy Hall of Fame. ![]()
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