To play a game with some important similarities to my team’s item stacking game, I played Jenga, a physical block-based game developed in the 1970s by Leslie Scott and produced by Hasbro. My team’s vaguely cat-themed game, with the current working title of Kitten Klimb, revolves around players choosing cards from their hand that correspond to a certain type of item (e.g. a plastic object or a red object), and adding an item meeting the criteria to a growing tower with different point values. Whoever has the most points when the tower collapses wins. Jenga is a much simpler game and focuses more on removing items from a tower than growing it, but its intended audience, playstyle, and basic mechanics are quite similar.
Fig 1: The increasingly unstable towers in Kitten Klimb (left) and Jenga (right). Yes, my Jenga set was previously set on fire, hence the burned blocks.
The first fundamental similarity between these two games is the audience. Jenga works for all ages because the game is simple and extremely easy to understand. Now I’ll admit that I had the wrong idea about Jenga because I’ve always only played with friends (not Jenga experts) and never bothered to read the box, so I thought you just had to remove a block each turn and didn’t know that you were also supposed to stack that block on top of the tower, so I suppose that I’ve been using a “house rule” this whole time. But even with this fundamental misunderstanding the simple game is still fun, so it is quite resilient to ignorance of its rules. So whether or not someone is old enough to read instructions, it is easy to understand a playable version of it. Our game is similar in this regard, albeit with the caveat that the player needs to be old enough to read the words on the cards (although symbols and drawings on them should help mitigate this somewhat). Neither game has complex systems that are fundamentally difficult for small children to understand, and hopefully our game has similarly broad appeal. And while both games technically only need two players, they tend to be more fun in a larger, party atmosphere where people can hoot and holler. So for the first component of the competitive analysis molecule, our games have similar intended customers, although Jenga probably works better for even younger audiences, even though Kitten Klimb‘s cards featuring cute cartoon cats might be appealing to children.
The next core similarity are the psychological motivating factors that guide how the game plays. From the list of factors we discussed in class, both games have motivators of achievement, power, and materialism (or did we call it physicalism in class?). These motivators speak to the “problem” each game is trying to solve in the competitive analysis molecule. We are each trying to provide a materially satisfying experience that allows for a sense of achievement and power, with players getting to jockey for victory and perform moves that can increase the difficulty for each other. The creators of neither game appear terribly interested in other possible motivators like sensuality or affiliation. We both seem to have come to a conclusion that achievement, power, and materialism are a satisfactory core for a party game and that building (or deconstructing) an increasingly unstable tower satisfies these motivators.
Playing a round of Jenga with my roommate (using our erroneous house rule that we just take turns removing blocks from the tower), made the materialistic motivation very obvious. The wooden blocks feel good and solid in the hand, the texture of the wood is pleasant, they feel weighted well, and it’s fun to feel how the center of gravity of the tower changes, and how the entire tower can quake as you carefully pull a block out. Kitten Klimb similarly has a materialist motivator, but it stems from choosing and placing a desired object. Kitten Klimb provides much more freedom of choice and placement (at the expense of lacking such a centrally well engineered item as a Jenga block).
The senses of achievement are quite similar, although a bit inverted. I felt a little surge of accomplishment that grew and grew each time I pulled an increasingly hazardous block from the increasingly unstable Jenga tower without it toppling because the likelihood of failure keeps raising the tension. Successfully placing an item on the growing Kitten Klimb tower feels quite similar, since the tower’s instability increases as more and more items are placed.
Fig 2: Pulling blocks near the bottom of the tower is a little dicey, but has a greater sense of achievement when you succeed!
Both games have a similar sense of power, since Jenga allows you to try removing blocks that more quickly increase the tower’s instability, giving the rival players fewer options and allowing you to exercise your Jenga mastery over them. Kitten Klimb leans into the power motivator a bit more, since it allows players to play cards that “attack” other players by forcing them to take extra turns adding to the tower. The mechanic of attack cards creates a deeper dynamic of antagonistic play in Kitten Klimb, and I like that extra dimension of tension beyond the tensions solely stemming from the tower’s instability.
Fig 3: I have bested my roommate! Unlimited powerrrrr!!!!
So while Kitten Klimb has more mechanics than Jenga, including the aforementioned card system that allows selection of different objects and attacking other players, the central mechanic that provokes the players’ reactions is quite similar: players take turns affecting an increasingly unstable tower, moving one item at a time. I think Kitten Klimb provides a fun spin on this mechanic, particularly because I think it’s fun to gamify building a tower of all sorts of different items taken from the surrounding environment, which I think is good for a wild party atmosphere, but Jenga’s beauty is in its simplicity. Jenga is probably the most elegant possible execution of this central idea. But Kitten Klimb might allow for more replayability, since players can choose to to include or exclude whatever items they wish, from placing small, durable items to the possible madness of stacking tables, chairs, and faberge eggs.
