You Will Never Lose with the Jenga Pistol

I’m a terrible Jenga player. It’s not that I’m bad at it – quite the contrary: I usually win – it’s that I’m a really, really annoying opponent. Which is why I’m so impressed by this Jenga pistol, a spring-loaded gun which will smack the wooden blocks so hard the pile left behind won’t even notice that they’ve gone.

Usually I line up a pencil and give it a whack with something heavy (a hammer is good, but a shoe will do) to achieve a similar effect. But not even I can come close to the awesome power of Matthias Wandel’s gun, which is so powerful and precise that it can shoot a single central block from the tower so fast that the entire stack above just drops nonchalantly down.

The rubber-band powered gun fires a pin into the blocks when you trip the trigger, transferring a whole lot of momentum into the little piece of wood. It’s like jerking a tablecloth off the table, only instead of creating a perfect, cloth-free table-setting, you send a dangerously sharp-edged wooden brick towards the faces and eyes of bystanders.

Matthias is currently on a simplified version three, which does away with the rubber-band retaining pulley of earlier versions. Full instructions are available for $6. I’m looking forward to adding to my Jenga arsenal. Sure, it might be cheating, but you’re looking at the person who once played short putts by lying down and cueing up the wrong end of the club, pool-style. It was surprisingly effective, until I got thrown out of the game.

Jenga pistol, version 3 [Matthias Wandel via Oh Gizmo]

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