December 15, 2003
Excerpt: Bringing Down the House
If ever there was proof that no one can predict what will be successful in the toy industry, this runaway hit of 54 wooden blocks is it.
A single Jenga block holds no immediate allure. It measures approximately 3 inches by 1 inch by 1/2 inch, each humble hunk of wood from the game unrecognizable from any other. But stack 54 of them up, 3 to a row, 18 rows high, and they’re transformed into a surprisingly suspenseful and addictive game.
Since Jenga’s breakout year in 1986, it’s become one of the most popular games in the world, at times second only to Monopoly in global sales. With such an amazing following, you might think Jenga was launched with a multimillion dollar TV campaign by a major U.S. toy company. But in fact, this stacking game had a much quieter debut over 30 years ago in Africa.
The Game from Ghana
Leslie Scott was born in Tanganyika and raised in Kenya, East Africa, before moving with her family to Ghana in 1972. In 1974, just before the 18-year-old was about to graduate from high school, her parents brought home a set of children’s building bricks they had purchased from a wood craftsman in the nearby city of Takoradi. Wood was plentiful and inexpensive there and the bricks, a simple gift meant for Scott’s little brother, changed her life.
“I don’t remember when we first started playing with the bricks as a game,” she says. “The bricks were slimmer back then and we stacked them three across, spaced apart from each other.” The rules were fairly basic at first. Everyone simply took turns removing bricks from somewhere in the middle of the tower until a player made it collapse. The Scott family named their game Takoradi Bricks after the city in which it was made. “My family had many more sets made in Takoradi over the years to give to friends,” Scott said. “I even took a set with me to England.”
Scott enrolled in Oxford to pursue a degree in teaching. She later dropped out and started a career in marketing, working first for a fledgling company called Intel and later for a business that made trade show booths. During those five years, Scott introduced her game to friends and colleagues. She improved upon it by adding a rule where removed blocks had to be placed on the top of the tower. Now as play proceeded, the tower grew increasingly tall and more unbalanced. The new rule added even more the fun and suspense to the game, which by then Scott had renamed “Jenga.”
“I grew up speaking Swahili in East Africa––it was my family’s second language,” Scott said. “We would often give our pets or things that were special to us a Swahili name. The word Kjenga means ‘to build.’ Jenga is the imperative, which means ‘Build’ or ‘Build it!’ So it’s a strong name.”
In 1982, after further encouragement from her friends and colleagues at the trade booth company, Scott decided to market Jenga. “We had a carpentry shop there and I asked one of the joiners if he could help me come up with a way to produce the Jenga bricks in a more mass-produced way,” Scott recalled. “We designed a template that could be attached to a machine that would produce them much faster.”
Banking on the Bricks
She copyrighted the rules and commissioned Camphill Products (a workshop that provided handicapped workers with employment) to produce and package 500 games in time for the London Toy Show. “At that stage I took samples to the bank to get a loan,” Scott shared. “I had quit my job, which was just so incredibly optimistic!” Scott credits her “naive enthusiasm” and the British government’s willingness to subsidize banks that helped small businesses, as two crucial points in Jenga’s journey.
“You can’t go to a bank today and tell them ‘I’ve got this idea,’ and show them a pile of wooden bricks and get a loan,” Scott said. “I thought that I’d take these games to the show in London and then have hundreds of thousands of orders. Of course it doesn’t work like that. By the end of it I owed the bank quite a lot of money.”
“I spent two or three weeks in December leading up to Christmas exhibiting the game in one of Harrods rather busy halls,” Scott recalled. “It would fall down and I’d be crawling around in this crowd picking up stray bricks.” The demonstrations worked and Harrods sold hundreds of Jenga games. With that success, Scott set her sights on America.
“At the time Europe was less accessible than other English speaking countries. Also, America was easier because I had a brother living over there and he and his wife were happy to keep stock in their house for me,” Scott said. She ran ads in several prestigious U.S. magazines, but received a lukewarm reception. Convinced that more stores would buy Jenga if she had a line of games, Scott did the unimaginable.
“I sold my house to keep Jenga going,” she said. “It was a huge risk I realize now, but when you’re younger you don’t think negatively.”
How did Jenga carry on from this humble beginning to become one of the most successful games on earth? Read Timeless Toys and find out!
ISBN: 0-7407-5571-4
AUTHOR: Tim Walsh
Read other The Playmakers Excerpts stories.
The Playmakers is a must for everyone who ever played with a toy or is still playing. I found it so incredibly researched, well written, and just plain fascinating that I bought one for each of our 3 daughters’ families. Tim Walsh, who just happens to be the nephew of a good friend of mine, thus my initial contact with the book, is a most talented author. His presentation of the toys and toymakers brings out all of the nostalgic feelings you could have of each one. The Playmakers is displayed on our coffee table at all times and is often perused by our guests, which always elicits a few stories about their childhoof favorites. Thanks, Tim
Posted by: Jan Gallagher at May 12, 2005 12:48 AMWOW. Thanks Jan!
Posted by: Tim at May 12, 2005 07:23 AMQuestion: what are the blocks with holes in them (and a ball in each hole) for? I remember playing the game with simple identical blocks, but the game I bought for my granddaughter in March had some half dozen of these special blocks, which baffle me…… Any hint?
Posted by: Jean Lepley at April 6, 2006 02:46 AMJean, I am not aware of any Jenga game like that. Perhaps the game you have is one of the many stacking games that Jenga has inspired?
Posted by: Tim at April 25, 2006 06:47 AMJean, the game you are referring to isGiant Jericho. It is made like Jenga, a high quality tower block game with a sting in its tail. When a player removes a block which contains a marble, that player can miss a turn whenever they choose, play continues until the tower collapses.
Posted by: Celia Bowen at October 13, 2006 12:58 AMMy friend just “won” a game of Takoradi by pulling a block part-way out and then moving another block with that block to restablize the tower. I called “foul,” but he thinks it’s fair. My thinking is that if it were okay to move blocks around like that, the whole game would be different because you could move blocks around to destablize the tower for the next person, etc. What’s your take on it?
-Many thanks in advance…
Kel
Posted by: kelley asher at December 27, 2006 09:59 PMCan anyone tell me where to find out about Leslie Scott “copyrighted the rules” I thought ideas can’t be copyrighted and “rules” are the ways of playing the game, isn’t that an idea? Anyone please advise. Thank you in advance.
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