We give a big shout out to the Jenga tower this month as we explore solo dexterity games. Maybe the first kind of solo gaming any of us did, the humble tower-o-blocks that you’re slowly picking apart, without knocking over, is at the heart of a challenging solitaire experience that we sometimes don’t even think of as a game.
Maybe you tried to ‘win’ Jenga by yourself as a way of getting better at it, so you could defeat an older sibling, or maybe you just wanted to see how high you could get the tower. Either way, the sudden idea of adding dexterity into a solo experience suddenly makes it a lot more exciting. I write a lot in this column about finding the friction and randomness in solo games – that generative element – here it’s just your own motor skills you’re competing with.