Jenga was created by Leslie Scott, a British game designer who grew up in East Africa and based it on a simple block-stacking game her family played with standard wooden building blocks.

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Jenga was created by Leslie Scott, a British game designer who grew up in East Africa and based it on a simple block-stacking game her family played with standard wooden building blocks. She named it after the Swahili word for build, which confused toy executives who desperately begged her to change it to something more aggressively American and self-explanatory. Despite immense pressure, Scott stubbornly refused to rename her creation, risking her entire deal with Milton Bradley to maintain the cultural homage to her childhood. Her stubbornness paid off massively, as Jenga is now universally recognized across the globe as the premier game of anxiety-inducing structural engineering, played primarily by drunk adults shouting loudly at a swaying tower in a crowded bar