Stealing tiles has both advantages (quickly forming a winning hand and scoring extra points) and disadvantages (being forced to reveal part of one’s hand to other players and not being able to change the meld once declared). Stanwick, Michael, ‘Mahjong(g), Before and After Mahjong(g): Part 1’. In: The Playing-Card, Vol. In: Mahjong Museum Report, Vol. In: Asian Games: The Art of Contest. Wilkinson, William H.,(1890): Published in 1901 as pp 184-194 of Catalogue of the Collection of Playing Cards Bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum, F. M. O’Donoghue. They were played with a stripped deck of money-suited cards. For these reasons Hong Kong mahjong is a suitable variation for the introduction of game rules and play and is the focus of this article. Hong Kong mahjong is essentially a payment system of doubling and redoubling, where winning from the wall adds great value to the final payment and where the dealer is highly rewarded or penalised if they win or lose.
Below are two examples of winning hands. Winning hands are scored by totaling the point value of each element in the hand. If the dealer wins the hand, they will remain the dealer and an extra hand is played in addition to the minimum 16 hands in a match. If the winner wins from the wall, their base points are doubled. Only the winner scores points. A common scoring limit is 64 points, which is the highest base points doubled twice. Variations may have far more complicated scoring systems, add or remove tiles, and include far more scoring elements and limit hands. Chan, Yan Xuan (26 May 2023). “How does an Automatic Mahjong Table Works? A Deep Dive”. Any other player who needs that tile to make a pong, make a kong, or to win may seize that piece instead. Dealing does not have to be strictly this way and may be done quite differently based on house rules. Babcock’s Rules for Mah-Jongg: The Red Book of Rules (Second ed.). Shenyang mahjong using 13 hands in a game, and Shenyang mahjong has a very fast speed on playing. Typically, this draw is performed during the initial deal to speed up play.
Starting from the left of the stacks counted, the dealer draws four tiles for himself, and players in anti-clockwise order draw blocks of four tiles until all players have 12 tiles, so that the stacks decrease clockwise. There are variations that feature specific use of tiles. There are several manga and anime (e.g. Saki and Akagi) devoted to dramatic and comic situations involving Mahjong. They have shown that a self-learning machine can be trained to compete with some of the best Richi Mahjong players. The other players have an opportunity to seize the discarded tile; if no one takes it, the turn continues to the next player. Even though both skill and chance play a fundamental role in the game, there is no shortage of superstitions in which players believe where they sit, how they hold their pieces or objects they have on their person will somehow affect the outcome. Standardization came with the formation of the National Mah Jongg League (NMJL) in 1937, along with the first American Mahjong rulebook, Maajh: The American Version of the Ancient Chinese Game, written by NMJL’s first president and co-founder, Viola L. Cecil. It is closer to the Chinese classical scoring system but only the winner scores.
Wind position is significant in that it affects the scoring of the game. These are exceptional hands, difficult to obtain, and are very valuable in point scoring. Suited tiles are divided into three suits and each are numbered from 1 to 9. The suits are bamboos, dots, and characters. They are the two oldest set Mahjong tiles found in the world. Mahjong nights in America often involved dressing and decorating rooms in Chinese style. In 1875, George B. Glover, a commissioner in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service during the late nineteenth century, donated a set Mahjong tiles to American Museum of Natural History and the other set to the Long Island Historical Society. In addition, unlike the suited and honours tiles, there is only a single tile of each bonus tile, so there are a total of four flower and four season tiles in the set. In 13-tile mahjong, the largest number of tiles for which a player can wait is 13 (the thirteen wonders, or 13 orphans, a nonstandard special hand). A concealed hand is one made up of only concealed melds. One hundred players participated, mainly from Japan and China, but also from Europe and the United States.
