I have a similar story about the jenga idea. In the first D&D game I played in, we used wood blocks of varying lengths to build walls. The guy that hosted the game cut down pieces of wood. We had 1 foot lengths, 6 inch, 2 inch and a few odd sizes to round out an almost perfect package for dungeon design. Each block was probably an inch tall or so with its base being a half inch? We were lucky that our host, who happend to be the Dm's uncle was big into minis and had alot of painted prop minis along with the 100's of minis for characters and monsters. I have also seen chess pieces used, string for entagles, erasers, and nearly ever game i run a player will pull out a piece of hematite that lives in his dice bag to represent either himself or something else.