Yagyu Shino and Ishigami Nozomi Invent an Online Jenga Where Chat Rules on Every Move

NIJISANJI — Nijisanji’s Yagyu Shino and Ishigami Nozomi spent most of a Wednesday-night collab stream playing a Jenga of their own making, in which the viewers, not gravity, decided whether a tower stood or fell. Shino hosted the online stream with senior Nozomi as her guest, and the pair ran for about two hours and twenty minutes.

Before any blocks appeared, they played a “big things” game, naming ever larger objects in turn: an ant, a house, a high-rise, Tokyo Skytree. Asked for something taller than Skytree, they settled on an airplane, then the International Space Station, and finally a black hole, which ended the round. When one of them suggested “this world” as something bigger still, they agreed to rule it out as too abstract.

“That was the tutorial. The real thing starts from here. Let’s reset the laws of physics once more.” — Yagyu Shino and Ishigami Nozomi, after the tutorial rounds

The main game was what Shino called Shino Jenga. Blocks were dragged around on a shared online whiteboard, with each player stopping a moving block where they chose, sometimes with eyes closed. When a placement looked doomed, chat voted by posting a circle (the tower holds) or a cross (it falls), and the players treated the result as final. Any block that chat ruled stable was then locked in place, and they periodically “reset the laws of physics” so that only blocks above a marked line counted. Several verdicts went the way of the circle on a second look, and one round ended in a cross.

Midway through, Shino brought out a second version built from wooden-looking blocks on the same whiteboard, with a red line marking where the stream’s frame cut off. The two worked out rules as they went: a player who touched the red line would win, and undoing a move was banned. Working through those rules, they found the game had a puzzle in it. They finished with a race to stack twelve blocks each, themed to Pocky Day on Nov. 11, and the whiteboard let a player stretch her own pieces into place.

Chat answered with a steady run of circles, crosses and laughter, and two Super Chats came in. As they closed, both said they wanted to play again, with real Jenga and with a plain chat stream, and signed off together with “otsu-Jenga.”