I stacked each block, compacting them carefully into a tower. I was precise; I tried to keep even corners from poking out the edges, double-checked that the perimeter was constant and clear, that each block was exactly where it belonged. At full height, it wasn’t as tall as I’d expected; but the tower was strong. It was full. As far as I could tell, it was perfect.
But the moment passed; it was time to play. Jenga towers are not meant simply to be admired, but to climb and crash, go forth, and back; that’s why Hasbro doesn’t paint the blocks, or rub the naked wood to give them luster.
I went first. I was new to the game and did not consider a strategy, although I chose a piece, of course, toward the top. No need to tempt fate.
As the story goes, Jenga – at least the boxed version of it – is the great accomplishment of Britain’s Leslie Scott, whose immaculate conception of the game inspired the Hasbro version in 1987. But the earliest version of what is now called Jenga, originated in Africa.
When Scott received a gift of wooden blocks bought from a carpenter in Takaradi, Ghana, she had been there with her family for some time. She grew bored of the blocks quickly, unpainted and rough as they were, so the girl (who receives to this day, cunning praise in certain circles for her creative originality) bore “Takaradi Bricks” on a sunny day in 1974.
Eventually, the British caught wind of Scott’s brainchild and claimed it as their own. Soon after, it was sailed to the United States, rechristened an American tradition, and manufactured for sale there, since history repeats itself, and Scott was at school in Oxford when she took out the copyright; although this latter part was by chance.
The man in Takaradi was not available for comment, though in 1978, the truth came out and “Takaradi Bricks” was finally unveiled as an ancient African tradition. The purveyors of truth, Jeff and Pattie Parsons, of England and the United States, respectively, have since sold the game “Ta-Ka-Radi!” by mail order from their Maine home, through a partnership with Lands’ End. Eternally loyal to their principles, the couple recently developed a Kwanzaa edition.
Both (“)Original(”) and Kwanzaa Ta-Ka-Radi! are great family fun, Jeff wrote; but the customized editions are a great corporate gift – since 1984. Or thereabouts.
Twenty five years later, in 2009, it was my turn again. I poked a left-center block gently; it glided swiftly out of the tower and fell to the floor. I picked it up and placed it carefully on top of the tower. The reorganization was successful. Nothing fell, nothing lost.
Jenga translates to “fall” from Swahili, which is not and never was spoken in or near Ghana. Other linguistic interpretations of the game engender more causal reasoning: the Spanish call the game “make fall.” But what make fall? In Hebrew, it’s “avalanche;” in Portuguese, “earthquake.” In Denmark, they call it “klutz tower.”
They would.
Before I knew it, the third turn was upon me. I wasn’t worried; I remembered that three is a lucky number in every culture or, at the very least, every civilized one, because God is a trinity. I pushed one of the blocks on the right side, which ended up being the wrong side, and it all fell down before I could even move my finger or curse the Lord for slacking.
The tower I had built with such assiduity was in shambles, and I was the loser. The person immediately beside me was the winner. It says so in the rulebook, above the bullet-point on good sportsmanship.
We play again, of course, but I won’t stack it this time. It’s frustrating when people muddle with what you’ve built and make it all fall down, especially when you lose. Let the winner build her own tower for us to ruin for sport; when it falls, I won’t care. It’s just a game when someone else tower topples, even if I pulled the piece that made it fall. “Losing” doesn’t feel so bad when you haven’t actually lost anything; I wouldn’t build the tower so I’d know I wouldn’t lose. Problem solved. The game goes on.
I actually ended up losing that round, too. I really didn’t care; the game may have gone on, but I wasn’t really playing.
In the beginning, there are flights: 18 levels of three blocks each. While there are always 54 pieces in a Jenga tower, the number of levels increases, as players remove blocks from lower parts of the tower and place them on the very top. The highest tower ever recorded at a Jenga tournament was forty (and two-thirds) levels high.
The victor, Robert Grebler, reached similarly successful heights in other unrelated, but nonetheless passionate aspirations, when he was granted the U.S. copyright to Jenga in 1987 and subsequently made $400 million in twenty years.
Grebler gives interviews, but I didn’t want to distract a stressed businessman. Furthermore, after a frustrating bout of phone tag with everyone except the carpenter from Takaradi, I didn’t want to spend any more time guessing and testing unlisted phone numbers to find him; and the police indicated that if I couldn’t help it, they had two-to-five ideas about other ways I could spend my time. So, as far as the Internet and I know, Grebler is still an inventor (though he hasn’t put together a successful invention since his application for the Jenga copyright in 1986; but like the man in Takaradi’s wife, we are holding our breath).
The carpenter in Takaradi is, as far as we know, working in the tobacco industry (it’s the city’s largest, after timber exploirtation and shipbuilding). According to statistics, Takaradi’s major imports are conditional foreign aid and AIDS.
Speaking of which, my playmates and I had to get to work too. We started to put the pieces away and realized we had been playing three blocks short of 54.
We figured we hadn’t noticed the omission because a whole level was absent: had we been missing one, or two, or four or five blocks, we would have figured this out earlier; but since they were three, there was nothing to suggest that anything should be there at all. We hadn’t counted or questioned what we saw; in fact, it didn’t occur to anyone to do so. We took it for granted that the tower was complete, and the eighteenth level was forgotten. And the game went on.
And so it goes. Humans will grasp pieces of a person and move them around. It may be with with, or without, their consent. But you have all the pieces, all the time. They move around, yet it’s rare for them to move away.
But: the blocks at the bottom are different. You can’t rearrange them, because they’re the ones that support everything else. Through the pushing and pulling, the poking and piling, the blocks on the lowest level sustain ones’ Tower of tremendous preciousness. If, and when those are removed – even if just for a second – everything collapses. It may happen that a tower is damaged when a middle block is removed; perhaps as many as the top ten levels will tumble. But when the bottom goes, it all falls down. It implodes, and all that was precious, becomes debris. It is not rock bottom; it’s ground zero.
When you begin to rebuild, hopefully you’ve kept track since the debuild, and remember which three blocks were undependable at the bottom. You hope you’ve been reasonable while considering whether one of them deserves a second chance there. You hope there are other blocks you can trust, blocks that are worthy of the position. You hope everything didn’t get so messed up in the crash that you can’t figure out which blocks were at the bottom to begin with. You hope you will see – or at least feel – your way through the mess, and don’t need to waste time speculating or crying amid the chaos.
This isn’t as simple as it sounds: sometimes players ignore architectural concerns and rush to rebuild a tower – any tower – in order to avoid sorting out the complications of the previous one. They’ll toss the blocks in a jumble before restacking them, without paying mind to which is which and why and what make fall. This frantic strategy is so common that Jenga blocks come with a plastic loading tray.
Other times, though, players have to take a while – sometimes a very long while – to ascertain if they even still have all the pieces. After all that, they have to figure out where everything goes, because with 54 pieces to deal with, you’ll never remember where everything was; though you’ll remember where you hid the three, or six or nine blocks you might wish to be rid of. And at the end of the day, the blocks all look the same – although, if you pay attention, they feel different. But as Leslie Scott and everyone with whom you went to middle school established: unpainted, lusterless things have never been instinctive attention-getters; that’s why Hasbro impresses so much color and shine on the box.
