Mahjong Tales

The Mahjong Line (TML) has done it again! They’ve designed a lovely mahjong tile set that will bring joy to all who play with it. Instead of a completely new approach to tile designs, The Classic Line harkens back to high end Chinese mahjong tiles carved a hundred years ago. TML designers were inspired by many of the images they saw on the vintage sets, but they put their own twists on the design. Even the color palette of the images, numbers and letters is new, as are the color of the tiles themselves.   The Dots are colorful specks...

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...