Mahjong

One night in Suzhou, our bus driver went to go meet his friends to play mahjong. Chengyan told us more about the game and we found out that Chinese mahjong is nothing like the American style solitaire mahjong. Renee suggested that Chengyan teach us how to play mahjong. Well, we looked for a mahjong set and I had the fortune of finding a mahjong set that Chengyan got me for a very good price- about $11. Although it was a good price, the joke was on me because the mahjong set is very heavy and I of course insisted on carrying it on the plane with me back home but that is another story. Anyways, we never got to play mahjong but I did learn the rules and the necessary Chinese characters for the game. The game is composed of four main sets of tiles. The first set is composed of north, south, east, and west Chinese character tiles. The second is fa, middle, and the door. The third is pies and the forth sticks. This game is kind of like rummy and is played with four people. To start the game, A north, south, east, and west tiles are found and each person takes one of these tiles. The person with the east tile starts. All the tiles are laid out in rows two deep and 17 long. The person with the east tile rolls the dice and whatever number they get is where they start drawing tiles for the game. The next person draws and it continues until each person has 13 tiles. After this, the game starts. The goal of the game is to get four sets of three and a pair. The sets are composed of either all of the same tile or a run. A person may either draw a tile or "eat" a tile. A person may "eat" a tile if they wish to have the tile that the previous person discarded and this is played when going for a run. A person may also "hit" any players tile if going for a "set". With both of these, the complete set must be shown to all players. The first person that gets the four sets and the pair wins. This game is also a gambling game but Chengyan told me several times not to gamble! Maybe we will "gamble" with peanuts or cookies! It was really fun to learn how to play mahjong and it was also interesting to see the real mahjong instead of the online solitaire mahjong.