The V&A Museum of Childhood has exhibited one of the original sets of Jenga since 1982. The blocks of the first sets of Jenga were manufactured for Scott by the Camphill Village Trust in Botton, Yorkshire.

Scott launched the game she named and trademarked as 'Jenga' at the London Toy Fair in January 1983 and sold it through her own company, Leslie Scott Associates. A British national, Scott was born in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, where she was raised speaking English and Swahili, before moving to live in Ghana, West Africa. The name jenga is derived from kujenga, a Swahili word which means 'to build'. Jenga was created by Leslie Scott, the co-founder of Oxford Games Ltd, based on a game that evolved within her family in the early 1970s using children's wooden building blocks the family purchased from a sawmill in Takoradi, Ghana. The last player to complete a turn before the collapse is the winner. The game ends when any portion of the tower collapses, caused by either the removal of a block or its new placement. A turn ends when the next player in sequence touches the tower or when 10 seconds have elapsed since the placement of a block, whichever occurs first. A block may be touched or nudged to determine whether it is loose enough to remove without disturbing the rest of the tower, but it must be returned to its original position if the player decides to move a different one. Once a level contains three blocks, it is complete and may not have any more blocks added to it. Each player may use only one hand to touch the tower or move a block at any given time, but may switch hands whenever desired. Starting with the one who built the tower, players take turns removing one block from any level below the highest completed one and placing it horizontally atop the tower, perpendicular to any blocks on which it is to rest.

A plastic tray provided with the game can be used to assist in setup. The blocks within each layer are oriented in the same direction, with their long sides touching, and are perpendicular to the ones in the layer immediately below. To begin the game, the blocks are stacked into a solid rectangular tower of 18 layers, with three blocks per layer. Blocks have small, random variations from these dimensions so as to create imperfections in the stacking process and make the game more challenging. Each block is three times as long as it is wide, and one fifth as thick as its length – 1.5 cm × 2.5 cm × 7.5 cm (0.59 in × 0.98 in × 2.95 in).

Jenga blocks large