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Learn To Play American Mahjong

akay | May 11, 2010 |

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Mahjong is an ancient Chinese four-person game that has been around for centuries. In fact, legend has it that it was the famed philosopher Confucius himself that invented the game around 500 B.C. Whether it is true or not, the game has survived to this day to entertain generations upon generations of players worldwide.

Mahjong infiltrated the West in the 1920s when it was brought to American in the 1920s. It became hugely popular and millions of mahjong sets were sold. Even though the tile blocks that made up the set were in Chinese, efforts were made to add Western lettering and numbers to help the players read the tiles. Moreover, some rules of mahjong were changed or added and thus, American mahjong was invented.

The goal of mahjong, whether you play American mahjong or Chinese mahjong is to make a winning hand of tile melds in a combination of sequences and sets. If you are familiar with the game of rummy, then mahjong will be an easy game to pick up as well.

American mahjong differs from traditional Chinese mahjong in the fact that additional joker tiles were added into play. As you can probably guess, the use of jokers helps substibute for other mahjong tiles.
Another significant change in American mahjong is that a Charleston commences each new game. A Charleston is the term given to the passing of tiles to other players. In the first round 3 tiles are passed to the player on the right, in the second round it is passed to the player across from you, and the third round goes to the left. If all players are in agreement to swap again, another optional swap is done of 1, 2, or 3 tiles across.

This twist adds a sense of randomness into the game and also gives you the hidden knowledge of what tiles your opponents are holding. It could be help them or hinder them but if your opponents are keeping their tiles, you know it has advanced their cause. What you do about it is up to your strategy.

Mahjong is a great game to learn to play and given its popularity and its adoption to other parts of the world, you'll probably become a fan as well.