Leslie Scott’s iconic stack of wooden bricks is a towering achievement of simplicity and tension. But there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to its enduring success

Words by Owen Duffy

JENGA

Few releases in the history of gaming have been as successful as Jenga.The block-balancing game’s simple premise and air of excruciating tension have seen it rack up more than 80 million sales, and since its creation in the 1980s it has grown from a one-woman project to one of the world’s biggest gaming brands.

It’s a game of skill, dexterity and careful stacking – and in a market where new products spring up at a bewildering rate, it’s remained popular for decades. But its success was far from a sure thing and, just like the hit release itself, the story of how it grew from an improvised game played with scraps of wood to a worldwide phenomenon is full of dramatic ups and downs.

We spoke to its creator, Leslie Scott, to discover how she created one of the world’s most popular tabletop titles.

BRICK BY BRICK

Scott’s history with games dates back to her childhood.

“I was born in east Africa,” she says, “in what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania. My mother was born out there, so there’s quite a long family connection. I came to England for boarding school when I was 13 or 14, but home was always Africa.

“I always played games with my family, because we’re quite a competitive lot, and television didn’t really enter our lives until I was quite a bit older. So we played all sorts of board games that were around at the time. Cluedo was one of my big favourites when I was younger. I still think it’s a good game, but I think the reason it was a real favourite was that it was the one time we could get my parents to sit down with us and we’d play as a family.

And it was the one game that I could win, so I used to love it.

“When we were slightly older, we loved word games. I remember things like Boggle being a really good game to play if you’re sitting on a beach. And we played parlour game kinds of things. We used to play a game which we called called ‘the dictionary game,’ which was similar to Balderdash. You’d have to make up fake definitions of words and try to guess which was the correct one.”