Giant Jenga

While I was in Washington Rebecca and I thought of a Christmas present that I wanted to make for our children - a big version of Jenga. We have seen these at the store before, but they usually cost somewhere between $80 and $120 although we did see one at Target on Black Friday for $50. Rebecca's dad has a table saw so we thought that it wouldn't be too hard to make one of our own.

I bought five 2x4 planks that were 8 feet long. I just got the cheap studs at Lowes that were only about $2 each, but I you could do it with better quality wood if you would like. If you do get the cheap pieces, make sure you sort through them to find the best ones possible.

So the tower stacks up in a rectangle with three blocks per row. Since 2x4s are really 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches, I cut each block to be 10.5 inches long. That gave me 9 blocks per plank and a total of 45 blocks (I wouldn't go much higher than that as if it gets too high it could hurt younger kids who might be playing when it falls). With the table saw it probably just took 30 minutes or less to cut them. I still have to sand them some time which might take another hour or so, but overall it was a very easy project. If you stained the blocks I think they would look really nice, but I think I might just leave them as is for now. If the kids really love it and it lasts without making too big of mess in our home, then maybe I will think about staining them at some point

We did test it out once with the children and then once with just the adults once the kids went to bed. The adult game was pretty intense. There were several close falls, but I think we got at up to maybe 4 feet tall.

We have the newspaper ads under it just because I hadn't sanded them yet and I didn't want to get wood chips all over the carpet, but once they are sanded I don't think there would be any problem with this being an indoor game as long as there are no breakables close by.