Mahjong Tales

The introduction of the exciting new designs of The Mahjong Line continues an almost 170-year tradition of evolution in mahjong, the most popular pastime in the world. Mahjong has long been played with different rules and tile iconography, from culture to culture, country to country, region to region, even table to table. Mahjong has always been a highly visual game with tile designs an important part of its appeal. Images on pieces differ from set to set, and this has been the case since the true beginnings of the game in the mid 1800s. From the time the game was first exported from China, foreign manufacturers working...

To better understand why the designs of mahjong tiles vary so much, it is necessary to go back to how and where mahjong developed. China has a long history of games, and with particular interest to a student of mahjong, card games. Chinese playing cards were originally woodblock prints on sheets of Chinese paper which were then cut up, producing cards roughly half the width of a Western playing card. Most of the designs were based on money, with 3 or 4 suits of single coins, strings of cash, myriads of cash and also, literally Characters (Craks).   Below we first see a Ma...

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."  -Alice in Wonderland At a mah jongg tournament last year, I witnessed the player opposite me win four games in a row. Impossible? No. Improbable? Yes. I wanted to quit. I felt bad. I doubted myself. I was jealous. I had evil thoughts. But I smiled each time and congratulated her because I knew I'd talk about her at lunch. “Who is she?” my friends wanted to know, so I pointed her out. “Oh, yeah, her,” someone said, “she’s always so lucky.”  We nodded our heads, each of us trying to recall a former moment of glory, preparing to top...