Category Archives: Celebrities and Entertainment

Jenga – Edge of Your Seat Fun!

• Jenga is a game involving the strategic removal of wooden blocks from an erected wooden tower, without toppling the tower, and it is said to be the second best selling game in the world.
• The term ‘jenga’ means ‘construct’ or ‘build’ in Swahili, and in the game, a beginning tower is made of 54 blocks placed in groups of three, in layers alternating in direction.
• The general play of Jenga is to remove blocks from the mid to lower sections of the erected tower, although taking them from higher up is mostly allowable, and put them on the top, all without the tower toppling.
• Leslie Scott, from England, commercialised Jenga, her first game, in 1982, showcasing it in the London Toy Fair in early 1983, however, it was not an instant hit, though in 1986, 400,000 units were ordered at the Canadian Toronto Toy Fair.
• Jenga blocks are traditionally made of wood and are manufactured with deliberate irregularities in the blocks to allow the game to function properly.

• The idea for Jenga grew out of a game played with children’s building blocks in the 1970s by Leslie Scott and her family, using blocks of wood from a local sawmill in Ghana, Africa.
• The original Jenga blocks have height by width by length dimensions of 1.5 by 2.5 by 7.5 centimetres (0.59 by 0.98 by 2.95 inches), and the game is distributed by Hasbro.
• As of 2015, the highest standing tower made from Jenga blocks was built in 1985 by Robert Grebler from the United States and was 40 complete layers in height with a single block remaining until the next layer.
• Jenga is very similar to the game of Ta-Ka-Radi, although Ta-Ka-Radi has the primary difference of the blocks being stacked on the narrowest edge, rather than the widest, with large spaces between the blocks.
• Various versions of Jenga have been produced including ‘Xtreme’ and ‘Ultimate’, while other companies have manufactured their own versions, including cylindrical shaped towers made with wooden blocks, and regular towers with plastic blocks.

Bibliography:
About, 2015, Jenga, http://www.jenga.com/about.php

How I created the 50 million selling game Jenga – by Leslie Scott, 2010, Screw Work – Let’s Play, http://www.screwworkletsplay.com/2010/05/how-i-created-the-50-million-selling-game-jenga-by-leslie-scott/

Jenga? Takaradi? Whats the difference?, n.d, Ta-Ka-Radi, http://www.takaradi.com/history

Jenga, 2015, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenga

Stevens J, How We Made Jenga, 2015, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/30/how-we-made-jenga

Amazon:       

Mastermind is the greatest tool to master the mind.

• Mastermind is a game that involves guessing a code, and the game is also known as ‘Master Mind’, while another name for a different brand of the game is ‘Secret Code’.
• Mastermind is often considered a commercialisation of a similar game named Cows and Bulls, which is playable using paper and pens, and is known to have been played in the 1960s, but possibly as early as the late 1800s.
• Two players are typically required to play a game of Mastermind – one devises the code, and the other cracks it over a number of steps, through the skill of deduction.
• Mastermind was invented by an expert in the telecommunications field in Israel, Mordechai Meirovitz, in 1970.
• Mastermind is played by making a code using supplied coloured pegs, and the opponent must correctly determine the correct position and colour of the pegs.

• Smaller black and white pegs are typically used to convey the accuracy of each guess – white to signify if a correct colour was used but incorrectly positioned; black if a correct colour was used and is in the correct position; or left blank if none of the code colours were used in the guess.
• There is a 1 in 1296 chance of correctly guessing the code in Mastermind on the first attempt, with a four peg code and six available colours.
• The average amount of turns taken to break a Mastermind code is four to five, while algorithms have been designed to crack a code in the most efficient process possible.
• The original Mastermind featured six colours and a four slot code, while these numbers vary across versions today, and variations have included letter or number pegs, rather than colours.
• It is not uncommon for a Mastermind variant to be programmed as a computer program, particularly due to its successful one person participation against a computer.

Bibliography:
Mastermind, 2015, Delphi For Fun, http://www.delphiforfun.org/Programs/Mastermind.htm

Mastermind, 2015, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_(board_game)