Jenga

The fun of real-life boardgames is, of course, cheating. Whether it's a secret stash of Monopoly money under your seat cushion, sneaking a glance at someone's Scrabble letters when they nip to the loo, or stabbing a rival in the eye with a Kerplunk stick, nefariousness always pays off.

Such is the case with Jenga. You can set the tower of blocks up a bit wonky and not tell your opponent. You can use two hands to remove blocks when they're not looking. Or you can just kick the table hard at a crucial moment.

Yes, we have run out of people who'll play with us.

You can't do any of that in Jenga the mobile game. More worryingly though, it can never match up to the experience of playing actual Jenga, where it's about the rising tension between human opponents, and the fingertip physicality of removing the wooden blocks.

So we were all set to be pretty rude about the mobile version, and file it under 'mistaken brand' with the Rubik's Cube mobile game that came out a few years ago.

Thing is though, as a mobile game, Jenga works. It does better than that, actually: it's really rather addictive. It might never be able to compete with the real thing, but the developer has taken an innovative approach to capturing its essence, and turned it into a hugely playable game.

The core game follows the same rules as its real-world version. You start with a tower of rectangular blocks, laid in a criss-cross pattern. Players take it in turns to remove one from the tower and place it on top, and if the tower collapses on your turn, you lose.

How do you replace the real-world action of pulling a block out though? Well, that's where I-play has really pulled its finger out (sorry) and thought hard about the interface. You control a floating hand, which can move up, down and around the tower, highlighting the blocks one by one. Press the left soft-key, and you'll give it a little push to see how stable it is. If the tower stays still, that block's a good candidate for pulling out. If not, it's best left.

Once you've selected a block, you press '5' to grip it, and can then pull it out. Several methods are included though. You can push it through then pull from the other side, or come at it from the side, and wiggle it from side to side as you ease it out. It works really well.

Meanwhile, there's a scoring system, rewarding you with more points if you choose riskier blocks. It doesn't change who wins a match, but it does add to your cumulative high-score, which is displayed on a leaderboard.

You can jump straight in with a Quick Play, or take on the full game, which is a series of 18 matches against mobile-controlled opponents. Strangely, there's no pass-the-handset multiplayer mode, which you'd think would be ideal for Jenga.

There are different locations to play in, each with their own graphical style, providing variety as you move from the jungle to the Arctic, for example, where you play with ice blocks. And it all looks good, with neat clear graphics, and a satisfying collapse animation.

Pleasingly, I-play hasn't been too reverential, adding in some new elements just for mobile. They come in the form of special blocks with different effects. So feather blocks are super-light and easier to remove, bumpy blocks are rougher and harder to take out, and wedged blocks need a block above or below them removed before they'll budge, and so on.

It's a welcome feature, adding spice without messing with the Jenga formula too much. All this contributes towards a challenging and fun mobile game, which deserves praise on its own merits, rather than a negative comparison with its real-world parent.

We would say it's the ideal mobile puzzler to while away a few train journeys, if we hadn't found ourselves returning to it in the evenings, when we should have been watching TV. It might not be able to reproduce the satisfaction of a purple-faced opponent screaming that they heard your boot make contact with the table-leg, but in all other respects, Jenga does the tabletop version proud.