Family Game Night: Jenga with a Twist!

At seven years of age Immy is all of a sudden all about board games and card games and family game time! So we recently introduced her to the game Jenga but not before I hacked it for a bit of extra family fun and a whole lot of laughs!

So how did I hack our tumbling tower? I painted the side of each brick with chalkboard paint and then used a chalk pen to write a fun activity on each one. Of course, you could skip the chalkboard paint and just use a permanent marker to write on your activities but by using the chalk paint and pen we can change the activities around depending on the age and interests of the players.

The activities you choose for each brick are completely up to you but ours included;

• Physical actions like handstands, cartwheels, somersaults, star jumps, push ups, balancing on one leg for 1 minute
• Ways of moving across the room – crabwalking, hopping, jumping
• Ways of pretending (act like a cat) and miming challenges (mine a nursery rhyme)
• Songs to sing
• Dances to do – including our current favourite, ‘Walk Like an Egyptian!’
• Counting challenges – count to 100 by 5s

Feel free to label more than one brick with the same activity as in most instances different players will pull each one.

So basically as each person pulls out a brick they need to perform the action on the block they have chosen.

For some extra fun and laughter, I randomly marked 5 of our bricks with asterisks. When a brick with an asterisk is pulled from the game every player mus complete the action.

You could also mark some bricks with another shape or motif and whenever these bricks are pulled the player can choose another person playing to perform the allocated action or task.

It really adds an extra element of fun to your family game night! Let me know if you try it.

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