Mah-jongg Part 2

Well, we made it home and I pulled my old mah-jongg set off the shelf, and opening the heavy wooden box was like a little pirate treasure moment. 

Now you can see why I thought the game was so complicated.  Because it is.  There was a basic rulebook full of typos, which barely cleared up any of my questions.  The previous owner had purchased two different years of official league combinations, 4 copies of each at $4.25 per copy.  So that's a thing.

The pieces were in big baggies, and I started by dumping out one bag only to realize they were in thodse baggies to make it easy to move them around to reach the parts beneath.  There was a little bag of joker tiles, and a bag of chips.  My set came with racks for the tiles, like Scrabble racks but with little pegs to hold your chip stacks for scoring.

The rules gave no indication of a two-player variant, it was for four people only.  I'm sure we could work out a system, but it boggled my mind that only those very specific, complicated patterns were considered valid.  I can't imagine a rummy club deciding that this year, only 3 kings and a 4-5-6-7 (etc) was a winning hand.

I was able to clear up one rule point, though.  The rule for picking up discarded tiles is not that it has to be the last tile discarded, but you have to be able to play the tile as the last piece in a combo OR the last piece to make your final hand.  It looks like, if you draw a discarded tile to make a meld, you have to leave that meld face up, which makes your hand an Exposed Hand, but if you get through to the end without showing any tiles, your hand is a Concealed Hand, and the two types of hands score differently.

Well, I could appreciate the streamlined rules from the other night, but it still feels like there is a lot more to this game, which isn't surprising for a game system that has lasted so many centuries.

On the funny side, I thought my set was much more of an antique than it turned out to be.  It goes back to that feeling of being an ancient mystery, I suppose.  The rulebook had no copyright or year, but the whole thing was made in Taiwan, and from the print quality I estimate it was produced the late 1970s to mid 1980s.

 


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