Jenga - Surprisingly Fun

Friday night at the pub we played Jenga. Our local is great - not only does it have a good range of constantly changing guest ales, it also has a few bar games including Jenga. I've also played Border Reivers in there before - a games-friendly pub.

Admittedly we didn't play vanilla Jenga, and a few drinks had been consumed, so my judgement may have been impaired, but it was good fun all the same. We played a variant where initially there are no rules, each time someone knocked over the tower they had to drink, but also invent a new rule to use in subsequent games.

The first rule we added was 'no testing' i.e. you have to take the first piece you touch, then after someone blew over the tower on someone else's turn, 'no blowing' was added - no surprise there! Then the rules started to get more interesting:

• On your turn you must be touching your nose (which forced one-handed play)
• You must take from the lowest full row
• You're only allowed to use you thumb and little finger
• You can only take one of the outermost blocks from the row

Of course any rules violations required drinking :-) Jenga was much more fun played that way - I can recommend it.

In other news, I got very little time for games last week. I had a couple of trips to London for work, both of which overran so I got home quite late a couple of times. Couple that with the washing machine failure (fixed!) I didn't manage to get to Paul's for games, and Dave was away for the week on a course. Although Beyond Monopoly! was on on Saturday, The Wife and I spent almost all weekend shopping for a new car (ours is finally on it's way out, and I'd like not to be responsible for its next service and MOT), so I didn't get along this week.

I also failed in my quest to do some more work on Codename: Network. I printed out some new cards, but I've not had time to fill them in or even cut them out. Hopefully I can do that this week.

This week will hopefully be better, I'm hoping to make it to Paul's tonight, and Dave's last games night before he moves to the South is tomorrow. I may even get some time to work on things on Friday - it's a Bank Holiday in the UK, but The Wife is on a course, so I'll be at home alone. I might see if Dave is suitably recovered from his work-leaving do the night before to play games/playtest in the afternoon.