When you’re homesteading in the exurbs, you need to find ways to entertain yourselves. Board games and tabletop games are a great way to build trust – or distrust depending on the games you play :) – in your community. My favorite game is probably Settlers of Catan – it’s kind of an introductory board game, but i think it’s just a classic.
Another classic is Jenga, but unfortunately, Jenga can get pretty boring pretty quickly. There’s all kind of variations though, like homemade Giant Jenga sets made from pieces of 2 by 4s, and even an Xtreme Jenga from Parker Bros. that uses blocks that have a rhombus like cross section, which causes kinks in the tower.
Same Jenga Rules, New Jenga Structure
This post is about a variation on the original structure using the original blocks (so you could play it with the Giant Jenga blocks too!) to make the tower taller, but still have the same structural redundancy and rules as the original game. This came about from getting bored of playing regular Jenga today.
Without further adieu, I call it Devil’s Tower Jenga:
To set up the Devil’s Tower Jenga game structure, you create 2 lines of 3 block each – as if you were setting up 2 lines of parallel dominoes. Then, place a block on top of each of the 2 lines, so that each block is supported by 3 “dominoes”. Then, place two more blocks perpendicular to the top 2 blocks to comple the square (as seen from above). Then use those two blocks as the base to build the same structure again, only this time the whole structure is rotated 90 degrees (as seen from above) from the original structure. Then repeat until you run out of blocks.
So each “story” of the tower takes 10 blocks, and each “story” is structurally redundant, so you can remove 1 or 2 blocks from each side of the story without knocking over the tower. And the structure is mostly stable, so you can continue to place blocks on top as you remove them.
In case that description was super confusing, I made a quick video of the setup and me playing it solo (with music by my multi-talented homie at fragmentsphotos.com):
Cleary, the name is inspired by the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.
Do you play any variations of Jenga? Let me know!