Matthew BaileyI rarely feature super mainstream games here on Little Board Gamers, but Super Mario Jenga is actually a game I play quite a lot. Generally, when it comes to mainstream games, they tend to be a lot better at doing dexterity games than they are at doing anything else.
Played here with everyone 
We all know how the game Jenga plays. You get these wooden blocks arranged in sets of three, perpendicular to each other on alternating layers. On your turn, you remove a block and place it on top. Eventually, someone knocks it over. I’ve never been a massive fan of Jenga, simply because there’s never really a winner. You just get a loser, and when you’re playing in a group of more than two, that’s never a particularly nice feeling – it’s just “well, you lost”, and that’s it.
Super Mario Jenga is different. Yes, you can still lose by knocking over the stack, but you’re also trying to get your Mario character to climb up the tower and jump over Bowser to win. That means there are two ways to engage with the game, which makes a nice change.
At the beginning of your turn, you spin the spinner, and this tells you what you’ve got to do. In some cases, this might be to remove one, two, or even no blocks at all. When you do take a block, you turn it over, and it’ll have something on it – either a bonus or, in some cases, a penalty.
As you remove blocks, you can also nudge other players further down the tower. It’s a really cool and fun alternative to Jenga that’s actually different enough that kids really like it. It probably comes out more often than I’d like to admit. It’s not perfect – everything is a little bit on the cheap side, and I’d have much preferred if the blocks were wooden rather than the kind of cheap plastic used. It doesn’t feel quite as nice to play as regular Jenga, but the addition of characters, pegs, and actual game mechanics piled on top of the dexterity aspect does make a big difference.
If I were going to revive or recommend a single version of Jenga, I’d probably pick this one over the regular version.
