There are so many reasons why individuals and companies alike invest in plant machinery for sale, but one of the most unusual cases is to use them to play a supersized version of one of the world’s favourite games.
Most people have played the game Jenga, a game where players take turns removing a block from a tower and placing it on top without knocking the whole structure down. It has proven to be surprisingly influential to many generations of tradespeople.
However, representatives from the company Caterpillar took the familiar tabletop game and made it 32 times bigger, earning a Guinness World Record for the largest game of Jenga in the process.
Because the 272kg waxed pine pieces are impossible for most people to move, the replacement for shaky fingertips are specially trained operators wielding telehandlers, skid loaders and excavators.
By the end of the 28-hour game, the tower reached roughly 20ft in the air before finally toppling, with a total of 16 moves made during that time, highlighting the care and precision needed to scale up a game such as this.
Initially, the team that set the record tried to plan the first six moves in advance, but as is common with a game of Jenga, the game itself cannot retain this strategic approach for very long, and the remaining ten moves were improvised and planned at the test site itself.
There was one caveat for the largest Jenga game ever, which is that the game had half of the number of blocks typical of a standard game. Whilst Jenga is typically played with 54 wooden blocks arranged into 18 layers of three, this version used 27 blocks and nine layers for safety and cost reasons.
Regardless of the tower’s size, it highlights the versatility of excavation machinery and the skill and precision of machine operators at the top of their profession.
