What happens when you combine a Jenga nerd with boredom and a set of dominos?
You get Micro Jenga!
And yes, it’s as hard as it looks.
Since dominos aren’t meant for playing Jenga, they don’t line up well for Classic 3 Jenga, but they do line up decently for Classic 5 Jenga. As you can see in the setup image, there’s a bit of an overhang, but that’s fine. (Actually, this photo was taken one move after the setup; I’ve already pulled one piece from the bottom row.)
Round 1
Play proceeds as usual, pulling pieces from any row below a completed row and adding them to the top, following the original pattern. Here’s the Micro Jenga tower early in the game:
Here’s the tower a bit later:
And here is the last photo I took before the tower collapsed:
Micro Jenga with dominos, is uniquely challenging for a few reasons:
- The pieces are really tiny, so poking or pulling them out with my regular-sized human fingers was tricky.
- The pieces are very slippery. As a result, there wasn’t much rotational stability in the tower: it spun easily because friction was too low.*
- The pieces are heavy for their size. This exaggerated any imbalance in the tower’s structure.
*It seems like there’s a sweet spot for the amount of friction between Jenga blocks. I’ve played with some Jenga sets that had very rough wooden pieces, and I’ve played with some that were painted and thus very slick. Both were much harder than a Jenga set with blocks that have a moderate amount of slickness: not too rough, not too slippery.
Round 2
The second time I tried Micro Jenga with dominos, I was at a friend’s house with a different set of dominos. These blocks were sized differently, so I lined them up like Classic 5 Jenga, but in rows of six rather than five. I also split the tower into a double tower to make it more stable:
Play went okay for a while. I found loose pieces to pull and placed them on top according to the usual double tower structure:
For some reason, certain areas of this Micro Jenga tower were difficult to pull from. But I still managed to get the tower decently high before it collapsed:
Due to the shape of the pieces and the difficulty of playing with them, I’ve yet to try any vertical Micro Jenga variations, but they are theoretically possible. If you’re looking for a serious Jenga challenge, find a set of dominos and give Micro Jenga a try!