Every so often, someone at a party pulls out Jenga because it was the only box in the cupboard, and a small part of me dies. I say this as someone who thinks about game design constantly: Jenga is the worst game ever made. Not the least fun — the worst designed. There is exactly one decision on your turn, and it is "please don't be the idiot who pulls the block that makes it fall." That's not strategy. That's a dexterity tax with a countdown.
So I did the thing I always do when something bugs me enough: I took it apart and built the version that should exist. It's called Kuzure — Japanese for collapse.
The one reversal that fixes everything
Jenga asks you to preserve a tower someone else built. Kuzure asks you to build one that screws over the person after you.
You start with three blocks on the table. Each turn, you add a block anywhere on the structure — and the whole game is that you're placing it to make the next player's placement harder. You're not carefully keeping the tower alive. You're an adversarial architect, and everyone at the table is quietly building a trap for everyone else. Knock it over and you lose the round.
That single flip turns the empty decision into a real one. Now every placement is a threat and a bet at the same time: how far can I lean this block out over the edge before it's my risk instead of yours?
A game of brutal architectural balance and inevitable collapse.— the one-liner I keep coming back to
Nobody sits out, and the tower never dies
The two things that kill party games are waiting and elimination — the friend who knocks the tower on turn two and then watches everyone else play for twenty minutes. Kuzure fixes both.
- The tower persists across rounds. When it falls, the next round just continues from the wreckage — a new structure grows out of the corpse of the last one. So the tower becomes an evolving sculpture over a whole night, not a thing you rebuild from scratch every ninety seconds.
- Losses accumulate; nobody is out. You play to a life count — say thirty dropped blocks max — so a bad early collapse costs you points, not your seat. Beginners drop a lot early; the cap makes them tighten up once they've burned through half of it.
- Two colors, alternating placement. Players place alternating colors, which deliberately makes parts of the tower fail sooner and forces people to start cannibalizing the structure — a second layer of sabotage baked into the pieces themselves.
None of that is complicated. It's four or five small rules that each remove a specific way the original game wasn't fun. That's the whole craft: find every dead spot in a thing everyone already knows, and quietly kill it.
The part where it's genuinely unfinished
Here's the honest counterweight, because I'd rather say it than have you assume otherwise: Kuzure is a design, a rules doc, and a prototype — not a product you can buy yet. It exists as a real playable ruleset and a growing pile of decisions in my notes, not as a manufactured box on a shelf. The plan from here is unglamorous and specific: build a proper prototype, make the demo video (working title: "Jenga is the worst game ever made, so I fixed it"), and take it to Kickstarter if the video lands.
There's even a naming scar in here I'll own: I called it TowerFall for a while, right up until Reddit gently informed me that's a beloved indie video game. Hence Kuzure. The internet is an excellent, merciless playtester.
The brand is the thesis
The look I want is brutalist modern architecture — ash-black and slate-gray blocks that feel like poured concrete, the kind of building that's ugly and monumental at the same time. Every game you play builds something new and a little bit horrible and worth photographing before it falls, which is why the plan includes a gallery on the site where people post their most cursed towers and vote on the best collapse.
It's a small thing — a box of blocks. But it's the cleanest example I have of the instinct under all of it: take a system apart, find the exact place the fun leaked out, and build it back so it can't.
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