E3 '07: Jenga Hands-On

As was revealed in the week leading up to E3 2007, Atari is working on a video game for the Wii based on the classic tabletop tower-building party game Jenga, and we got to see an early version of it for ourselves today. From what we've seen so far, the game seems to mimic the Jenga fundamentals pretty well. You're presented with a tower of rectangular blocks, and players then have to take turns pulling blocks out from the middle and stacking them on top. The challenge is to keep pulling blocks without causing the tower to topple. Since collapse is basically inevitable, the strategy eventually turns into pulling blocks in such a way that it forces the other players to pull blocks that are more important to the tower's structural integrity.

Anyone who's actually played a real-life game of Jenga knows that the tedium of having to rebuild the tower after it topples almost negates the enjoyable challenge of playing the game; this will obviously not be a problem with the video game version of Jenga. Pulling and placing blocks will be done intuitively with the Wii Remote, though the control sensitivity still needs to be tweaked, a point that Atari is aware of. While controlling an onscreen cursor with the Wii Remote, you'll hit the A button to select the block you want, then it's just a matter of actually pulling the Wii Remote backwards, or to the sides, in order to pull the block out. Placing the block atop the tower works much the same way.

In addition to a vanilla game of Jenga, Atari will be including a lot of variables that could only happen in a video game. There are different types of blocks you can play with, and the materials they're made of can affect how they handle. You'll be able to choose from different backgrounds, including space, water, jungle, volcano, and castle, and aside from changing the scenery, these backgrounds will also effect the gameplay. For example, the space background will decrease the gravity on the blocks, while water will cause the general movement to be more sluggish. They get more bizarre from there, with the jungle level being infested with hungry, block-eating dinosaurs, and the castle level being subjected to high winds.

In addition to the effects these backgrounds will have on a regular game of Jenga, each will also serve as the backdrop for a unique minigame that will make use of Jenga pieces. In the one example we saw, the volcano environment served as the background for a minigame where you used a Jenga block to juggle hot, molten rocks that were being spit out of the volcanoes. Players will also be able to select unique avatars to play as, and though this feature hasn't yet been implemented, Atari is hoping to imbue them with specific gameplay modifiers as well.

With all of these different ways to tweak how Jenga handles, along with the inclusion of four-player support, there's definitely the potential to keep the game feeling fresh for a while. The inherently tactile nature of Jenga also seems to make for a natural fit on the Wii. You can expect more on this game as its release approaches.