Sawmill blocks, an Oxford circle of friends and a Yorkshire workshop.

Jenga began as a family game. In a profile published on 5 November 2020, Nicolas Ricketts, a curator at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, writes that Leslie Scott was born in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, and that her family later moved to Ghana. They had played a block-stacking game together since her childhood, and she commissioned sets of blocks from a local sawmill; English Wikipedia places that sawmill in Takoradi. When Scott later moved to Oxford, she brought some of the sets with her. Her British friends took to the game, she told the museum, “but it took me a while to realize that it didn’t actually exist as a product.”

Scott dates the game itself to 1982. In a guest post for the V&A Museum of Childhood’s British Toy Making blog in December 2009, she wrote that one of the earliest things she did after creating Jenga that year was to ask the museum in Bethnal Green to add it to its collection, and that the museum accepted and exhibited the game while it was still unknown. English Wikipedia, citing Scott’s own book About Jenga, says she launched the game, named and trademarked as Jenga, at the London Toy Fair in January 1983, and sold it through her own company, Leslie Scott Associates. Wikipedia also describes Scott as a co-founder of the games publisher Oxford Games Ltd.

The earliest sets were made in England. Scott’s 2009 post says they were manufactured by the Camphill Community in Yorkshire and put on the market in 1983; Wikipedia names the maker as the Camphill Village Trust at Botton, North Yorkshire. Ricketts quotes Scott’s account of the arrangement: the community agreed “provided that, if the game was a success, I’d find an alternative manufacturer, as they didn’t want to be stuck making little blocks for the rest of their lives.” The London department store Harrods, the museum says, agreed to order sets if Scott would demonstrate them herself over the Christmas holidays.

The rules, as English Wikipedia sets them out, are short. The blocks are stacked into a tower of eighteen layers, three to a layer, each layer at right angles to the one below. Players take turns pulling a block from any level below the highest complete one and placing it on top, touching the tower with only one hand at a time, until part of the tower falls. The last player to complete a turn before the collapse wins.

Pokonobe, Irwin Toy, Schaper and Milton Bradley.

The rights to the game moved quickly once it reached North America. English Wikipedia, drawing on Scott’s book and on Tim Walsh’s 2004 history The Playmakers, says that Robert Grebler, a Californian entrepreneur and the brother of a close friend of Scott’s, contacted her in 1984 about importing and distributing the game in Canada. In April 1985 he acquired the exclusive rights for the United States and Canada, and in October 1985 Scott assigned him the worldwide rights, which he in turn assigned to Pokonobe Associates, a company he formed that year with two cousins. Wikipedia quotes Scott as saying she “came to regret signing away my rights to Jenga on those terms.”

Pokonobe licensed Irwin Toy of Canada to sell Jenga there and to act as master licensee around the world. The Strong’s account says an Irwin Toy executive spotted the game being demonstrated in a Toronto department store, and that Irwin signed a deal to produce it in Canada and took it to the 1986 Canada Toy Fair. According to Wikipedia, citing Walsh, Irwin licensed the game in the United States to Schaper, and when Schaper was bought by Hasbro, Jenga was launched under the Milton Bradley banner in 1987. Hasbro, of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, had agreed to acquire Milton Bradley in May 1984, The New York Times reported at the time.

The Hasbro side of the story comes from Alan Hassenfeld, quoted by the Strong. He recalls that he and his brother Stephen Hassenfeld played Jenga at Stephen’s apartment in New York and “fell in love with it”, and he puts the launch a year earlier: “When we launched in 1986, we were at the cusp of video games like ColecoVision and Atari.” Production then left England. Scott wrote in 2009 that the V&A’s set was one of those made in England before Irwin Toy of Canada, after which, in her words, “the Hasbro Corporation acquired the rights and started having Jenga made elsewhere.”

Wikipedia says Hasbro eventually became the licensee in most countries, and, citing a 2019 report in the Orange County Register, describes Pokonobe Associates as the owner of the Jenga brand. Licensed giant editions, sold as Jenga Giant and Jenga XXL, are made and distributed by Art’s Ideas, Wikipedia says. In November 2020 the Strong, which runs the National Toy Hall of Fame, named Jenga one of its three inductees for that year. Ricketts closes his profile with a line Scott gave the Oxford Times: “In a world that was getting more and more complex, this was something simple, and sometimes simple works.”

Design and documentation.

Toy and game packaging does a different job from most retail packaging, because the box is often the first thing a child sees and the last thing an adult reads before buying. Many toys are sold in a window box, a carton with a cut-out panel covered in clear film so that the product itself can be seen on the shelf. Card and party games more often come in a tuck box, a small folded carton with a flap that tucks in at the top, sized to fit in a pocket or a drawer.

Board games and larger toys tend to use a two-piece box with a printed lid, and the lid has long carried photography or illustration of people playing, so that the picture shows how the game or toy is used as much as what is inside. A logo on a toy or game box usually has to work at several sizes: across the front of a lid, along a narrow side panel when the box is stacked, and on the pieces, cards or the product itself.

Each guide that follows looks at how one name has been carried on its boxes, logos and advertising over time, and who has owned that name along the way.

A Swahili word, a plain block and a name that stayed.

The Jenga identity begins with a word. Scott grew up speaking English and Swahili, and the Strong’s account says the name comes from the Swahili kujenga, “to build”. It was a deliberate choice. “I’d thought very hard about the name, though,” Scott told the museum. “I had deliberately not chosen a descriptive name like Tumbling Towers. I had this idea: that when you said Jenga, everyone would think of the game and nothing else.” Ricketts writes that both Irwin Toy and Hasbro thoroughly disliked the name, and that it almost broke the deal. Scott kept it. “I stuck to my guns,” she said later.

The second element is the block. English Wikipedia gives its proportions: each block is three times as long as it is wide and one fifth as thick as it is long, about 1.5 by 2.5 by 7.5 centimetres, with small random variations from those dimensions to create imperfections in the stack and make the game more challenging. Several of the official variants Wikipedia lists change the blocks: coloured blocks and a die in Throw ’n Go Jenga, three colours of block in Jenga Truth or Dare, parallelogram-shaped blocks in Jenga Xtreme, and blocks scaled up for the Giant and XXL editions, in which players may use two hands.

The official site, jenga.com, sets the name in its copy as JENGA® and Jenga®, and attaches trademark symbols to edition names such as Jenga® GIANT™ and Jenga® XXL. Wikipedia also records licensed editions carrying the colours and logos of sports teams and companies, and themed sets tied to films, television series and video games, from The Nightmare Before Christmas to Super Mario. Alan Hassenfeld’s recollection, quoted by the Strong, gives the maker’s view of the game’s appeal: with Jenga, he said, “you could open up the box and just start playing immediately.”

For a design guide, Jenga shows how a coined name with a clear origin, attached to a single plain object, can pass from a family table in Ghana to a Yorkshire workshop, a Canadian licensee and an American games company while the word on the box stays the same. Compare it with Connect 4, another game sold under the Milton Bradley name, and Monopoly, another Hasbro board game. For this guide we use tower red, beech blond and pale wood with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jenga’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.