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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