Sunday, June 14, 2009

How to play the common version (Cantonese) Mah Jong (beginner version)

Due to Theo's love to Mah Jong, I decided to make a tutorial of my own for Mah Jong. Hopefully, this can make more people to play Mah Jong. The Mah Jong set looks like this:
There are four duplicates of each tiles if you exclude the 8 pretty flower tiles on the bottom right.
To start the game, you need 4 players exactly with 1 player on each side. Each side will then stack 2 stacks of 17 tiles facing down, with 1 stack on the top of the other stack. The dealer will then roll the 3 dices to decide where to cut the tiles.
For example: In this table:
Karl(top)
Mark(left)
Theo(right)
Me (dealer, bottom)
If I roll a 15, you will start counting on me as 1 in a counter-clockwise direction, and it will end up on Karl.
If I roll a 6, it will end up on Theo.

Afterward, you will start counting from the left of the tiles with the number you got on the dices on the person where the counting ended up on.
So if the number ended up on Karl with me as the dealer, Karl will help me (using 15) count, and there are four tiles left on his right. The dealer will take those 4 tiles, whoever on the dealer's right side will take another 4 tiles in a clockwise direction. Continue this process until there are 12 tiles for everyone. The dealer will then take one tile on the top and take another tile that is one step skipped away from the tile he picked up from. The rest will take one tile that is outer most in order. In conclusion, the dealer will have 14 tiles in total, while the others only have 13. The game starts with the dealer dealing out the first tile, and continues with the other player drawing 1 tile and discarding 1 tile until all the tiles on the draw pile runs out or someone wins.

For the games of beginner, you would try to have sets of 3 and a pair to win the game.
Let me show you an example to win the game.

In this example, there are 4 sets of combination and a pair. (4 *3 +2) = 14
A combination is accomplished when the 3 tiles is a triple or a straight itself.
If you are 1 tile away from winning, you are in a tenpai position. You can win if you draw the right tile yourself or if other players deal out the right tile for you. If other players dealt out the right tile (only when you are in tenpai), you can take it and claim the victory.

There are some methods to help quicken your win.
1: Pong- pong is a set of 3 identical tiles. Let say you have two identical tiles in your hand, and
some other player dealt out the 3rd. You can take that piece and use it as Pong. After you
pong, you need to deal out one tile, so you can keep a hand of 13 tiles including the pong tiles.
Whenever someone pong, the game continues with the person on the right to draw the tiles
unless some other people pong with the tile dealt out.
2: Kong- kong is a set of 4 identical tiles. Kong is similar to pong except you have 3 identical
tiles in your hand, you can kong whenever you draw the 4th tile or some1 dealt it out. Also,
you can kong when you ponged already, but this only apply from a self draw. When you kong,
you are allowed to draw a new tile at the end of the draw pile. You need to deal out a tile
afterward, so you will still have a hand of 13.
3: Chi-chi is a set of 3 tiles in a straight order. You can only use chi from the tile dealt from the
peson on the left. After you chi, you also need to deal out a title like you did in pong.
4. Eye- an eye is just a pair of identical tiles. Remember you need to have a pair to win the
game? Yep, that's also called an eye. Choosing which set to be your eye in advance can help
you to prepare tenpai easier.

The dealer chip will move to the next person unless the dealer wins himself. When the dealer chip comes back around, a turn in finished.
This is the basic version of tutorial for beginner. An advance version will come out later for advance games.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah! I learned how to play MahJong in Mandarin class and have had a hard time finding the rules that my teacher used. This is the way she plays. Thank you!

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