My £3 fun at home

I've created the Toys on Hive community for nearly two weeks, and still haven't made a toy post myself!! Part of the reason is I haven't been posting that much, and the other reason is the few toys I have aren't here with me in UK. That makes my life pretty boring and unhealthy, as I'm spending all my spare time in front of the keyboard. With that in mind, I decided to rectify the situation the other day and buy something to entertain myself. Here's what I got.

This is a set of knock off Jenga. I used to have a proper set which are double this size of this, and had many hours of fun with it. This is one of the few games hubby will play with me instead of playing on his Candy Crush, that's why I bought it.

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You can tell the quality between the knock off and the proper ones. First is the name of course. They can't call it Jenga, so it's simply called Wooden Tumbling Tower. It does what it says on the tin. And the price. This only cost £3, I think Jenga cost about 4 times as much.

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Next the packaging, When I bought it, the blocks are sealed in a plastic wrapping inside the cardboard box. The box has an opening in the front. Guess what happens after I remove the plastic wrapping? Isn't this a stupid design? Now I have to make sure I store the box the right way up so the blocks don't slide out.

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Size is another difference. Personally I'm ok with that, I just treat it as a smaller travel version. But with size, comes weight. These are made of light plywood, I remember Jenga are made of heavier wood. When I pull a block out of these, sometimes the top doesn't have enough weight and they move quite easily. We've allowed ourselves to cheat and can use one other finger to support the stack when we remove the block. Otherwise we'd finish the game very quick. I guess that improvisation adds to the fun!

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My biggest gripe with this is stacking them back in the box. With Jenga, if I remember correctly, the box also has an opening in the front. But they have something else that makes life a lot easier. It was a plastic container, half a container to be precise, ie it had two sides the height of the whole stack, and a base. You stack the blocks inside the container and slide it inside the box with one of the sides facing the opening. It makes stacking the blocks so much easier, and putting the blocks back in the box is a breeze. The most important thing is that the blocks won't fall out of the box because it has a plastic cover shielding the opening. It's these little things that make all the difference. But then, this set of knock off only cost a quarter of the price, you get what you pay for. Fair game.

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Anyway, I've managed to ply hubby away from his Candy Crush to play fake Jenga with me. There are 54 blocks, 18 layers.

We add another four and a bit layer on top of the original eighteen layer before hubby lost. I took this photo just in time before it toppled over. One win to LUT!!

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I think we've been spending too much time in front of our devices during lockdown. Hopefully this £3 will be well spent to keep us entertained at home as there is no end to lockdown yet.