Outdoor Family Games for Camping or Parties

Last weekend, we went camping in our RV for the first time in a year. We store it about 30 minutes from our house in a wooded area on the edge of some beautiful Southern California mountains. We invited all the kids and promised them we’d be playing outdoor family games, eating good food and just having fun together. Our RV site was in the shade of a huge tree and the weather was perfect for camping. We couldn’t have picked a better weekend.

Adding to our usual family game night was our new Jenga GIANT, the biggest authentic hardwood Jenga, with polished wood blocks that can stack up to 5′ tall, or about 42 layers, if you know what you’re doing.

We do not, so our biggest tower only got to 33 layers, but our overly-competitive family had a blast even when we got to less.

The game is easy. Find a level playing field and stack layers of three blocks one way, three blocks another, and so forth, until you’re out of blocks. (It starts around around 2′ tall.)

Determine your teams or if you’re playing individually against each other, and decide who goes first. Go around the circle and everyone attempts to move one block without disrupting the tower. Whoever it falls down on is the loser!

There are more specifics to the Jenga rules, such as use only one hand at a time, and the Jenga directions are included in the carry bag, which is solid and stores everything easily enough without taking up much space. (We can easily stow ours in the game cabinet of our RV, next to ladder ball, bocce ball and our customized Avengers cornhole game!)

As you can see, it can take a lot of concentration.

This new giant Jenga is a really fun addition to our outdoor family games collection. Its 54 blocks each are about 15x the size of the regular-sized Jenga game, so you have an idea of exactly how big it is. The blocks are smooth, polished and each is branded with the word Jenga.

Our Jenga games each lasted longer than we expected. We decided to be okay with it if someone turned the tower when removing a block, so it ended up in precarious positions more than once, adding to the fun and suspense. We took our time and when we played with five people per game, each person got quite a lot of turns and even more laughter.

Jenga GIANT would make a great Christmas gift for that family that you scramble for ideas for each year, and as big as it is unpacked, I can think of a couple of people I could have this shipped to each year. Everyone’s familiar with classic Jenga and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like more outdoor family games for picnics or parties. We plan on setting ours up for our yearly July 4th block party, our Easter yard games (weather permitting) and if we want to keep it small, we can set it up in our backyard in the grass.

If you want to take it up a notch from casual family-style games, Jenga GIANT also includes a pad of competitive score keeping so you can use a dry-erase marker to tabulate who moves on in a regular competition. I think we need to do this next, as we have a lot of people here for parties and open houses, and this would make our dinners unique!

One of my favorite things with Jenga GIANT? It’s something everyone can play! No one has to be left out, even younger kids can play and there’s no limit to how many game players. It’s an item we’ll be using over and over. (Suggested age range is 12 and up, but I think kids much younger can at least participate.) Suggested purchase price is $169.95, and you can find out more about that on the Jenga GIANT web page.

If you like to go camping in a tent, or to go RV camping, read about last year’s big Kern River camping adventure; I share tips on how to organize for a big camping trip with a lot, or just a few, people! See you on the road!