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a game of Chinese origin,
played with tiles, or p'ais, similar in physical description to those used in
dominoes but engraved with Chinese symbols and characters and divided into
suits and honours. A fad in England, the United States, and Australia in the
mid-1920s, the game was revived in the United States after 1935 but never
regained its initial popularity. In the United States, the official body is the
National Mah-Jongg League, founded in 1937.
The game is probably of
19th-century origin. Before World War I each Chinese province had its own style
of play and dialect name for it. Signifying "sparrow," the name has been
variously transliterated as ma tsiang, ma chiang, ma cheuk, and ma ch'iau. The
sparrow or a mythical "bird of 100 intelligences" appears on one of the tiles.
The name mah-jongg was coined and copyrighted by Joseph P. Babcock, an American
resident of Shanghai, who is credited with introducing mah-jongg to the West
after World War I. In order to promote the game in the West, he wrote a
modified set of rules, gave English titles to the tiles, and added index
letters and numerals familiar to card players.
Modern mah-jongg sets are usually made of plastic instead of
bone or ivory. A full set contains 136 or 144 tiles, depending on whether the
flowers or seasons are used. Some sets include 20 flowers.
The game is
usually played by four individuals. The object of play, similar to that of the
rummy card games, is to obtain sets of tiles. There are three kinds of sets:
chow, a run or sequence of three tiles of the same suit in numerical order;
pung, a sequence of three like tiles of the same suit and rank, such as three
dragons of the same colour or three identical winds; and kong, a pung plus the
fourth matching tile. The winner is the first player to hold a complete
hand--i.e., four sets and a pair of like tiles (14 tiles). The strategy of
mah-jongg, like that of rummy, is both offensive and defensive: to complete a
winning hand as quickly as possible; to block other players by not discarding
tiles useful to them; and to build a high-scoring hand.
A really usefull
site for finding out about the game and some of its history is at
Traditional
Games Online |
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