Mahjong 麻將
Mahjong is a Chinese board game for four players, played with 144 special tiles. The word comes from the Chinese 麻將 (májiàng in Mandarin). In Japanese it is usually written 麻雀.
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The discards
Your hand
You sit in the East seat for the first round. Touch a tile in your hand to aim at it, then "Discard". When an opponent throws a tile you are allowed to take, the buttons appear under the running commentary.
This game plays by the simplified rules published by this site — the article « Mahjong - Les règles simplifiées », whose sequence of play and whose scoring are reproduced word for word below. The other article, « Les règles avancées du jeu », is three times as long and a good deal richer, but it stops short at the moment of counting points: its last section links out to a third-party site. Making it playable would have meant inventing its scoring table, which this site does not do. What it does give in full — where the players sit, how the winds turn, which flower answers which wind — is applied all the same.
The sets
The Pair
A pair is two identical tiles.
The Chow
A chow is a run of three tiles that follow one another. Chows can only be made with ordinary tiles.
The Pung
A pung is a set of three identical tiles.
The Kong
A kong is a set of four identical tiles.
A winning hand
A winning hand is in most cases made of 14 tiles arranged into 4 basic sets (chow, pung, kong) and one pair.
How a round is played
- Each player in turn "draws" a piece from the wall and discards another one. A piece discarded by another player may only be taken in order to form a set.
- Any set formed with a discarded piece must be laid out. A discarded piece may only be taken to form a run when it is the player on your left who has just thrown it.
- Any player at all, on the other hand, may take a discarded piece to form a triplet or a quad.
- Where several players want the same piece, the quad and then the triplet take priority over the run. But if the discarded piece allows a player to declare MahJong, he has absolute priority. Where there is a conflict, the first to play, in turn order, wins.
- A quad must be exposed even if it was formed with a piece coming from the wall. And the player must draw a new tile from the right-hand end of the dead wall to complete his hand, since a quad counts as 3 tiles once exposed.
- As flowers and seasons do not count as a tile once exposed, a new tile must likewise be drawn from the right-hand end of the dead wall to complete the hand and hold 14 tiles when the time comes to play.
- You can go MahJong with a drawn tile coming from an opponent's discard or from the wall.
- Once the first player has gone MahJong, the other players carry on playing as long as tiles remain in the wall and there is still hope of going MahJong in turn.
The round ends as soon as the last piece making up the wall has been drawn (do not touch the dead wall) or the last player has gone MahJong.
Scoring
- every flower or season scores 5 points;
- every triplet scores 5 points;
- every quad scores 10 points;
For the players who have gone Mah Jong:
- the first of the 4 players to have gone MahJong scores 100 points;
- the second of the 4 players to have gone MahJong scores 40 points;
- the third of the 4 players to have gone MahJong scores 20 points;
- the fourth of the 4 players to have gone MahJong scores 10 points.
then the total score is multiplied by:
- × 2, if the MahJong, honours aside, is made up only of triplets or quads;
- × 3, if the MahJong, honours aside, is made up of pieces of a single suit (or family);
- × 10, if the MahJong is made up of honours only.
The winds
The person named as the south wind will sit to the right of the one named as the east wind; the person named as the west wind will sit opposite the one named as the east wind; the person named as the north wind will sit to the left of the one named as the east wind. Note that this arrangement runs contrary to the natural arrangement of the compass points.
When a round is over the winds turn, that is: the person who was South becomes East, the one who was West becomes South, the one who was North becomes West and the one who was East becomes North — unless the round was won by the east wind, who then keeps the east wind, in which case the winds do not turn.
The flowers and the seasons
In fact the name "flowers" for these tiles is not quite exact, since it covers two sorts of tile: the flowers proper, and the seasons.
The four flowers are the orchid, the bamboo, the chrysanthemum and the plum. The four seasons are spring, summer, autumn and winter. They all answer to the directions of the winds.
To the east wind answer spring and the orchid.
To the south wind answer summer and the bamboo.
To the west wind answer autumn and the chrysanthemum.
To the north wind answer winter and the plum.
Where the game comes from
Many theories exist as to its origins, but none of them is any more reliable or any sounder than the others. The game is thought to come from an old card game, and in its earliest form held forty pieces called Pai (pronounced "pie") — in English the usual word is tile, and that is the one we shall use here — which were quite unlike those of today's game.
In the eighteenth century the number of tiles grew to 108, standing for the portraits of the 108 outlaws of a famous novel of the time.
As time went on the number of tiles grew further, up to 160, with all sorts of bonus tiles, flower tiles among them. Reformers appeared and cut the number of tiles down to make the game more attractive. The rules of the game were then settled, and have been sealed ever since. The flower tiles as we still know them today are relics of that period before the reforms.
Other spellings often met with: Mah-jongg (an American trade mark), majong (from the French spelling reform proposed in 1990) and a host of English approximations: Mah-Jong, Mahjong, Mah Jong, and so on.
Mahjong is the national game of China. It is sometimes also called the Chinese game of the four winds.
What the tiles stand for
Since it is played with "tiles" physically like those used for dominoes, but with Chinese symbols and characters engraved on one face, it is nicknamed "the game of moving or laying bricks". It is also known as a game of encirclement.
Legend has it that mahjong was invented by an ancient Chinese strategist who used tiles to mimic battle formations.
A complete mahjong set holds 136 indispensable tiles + 8 supreme honour tiles:
- 36 "sticks" or "bamboos" (numbered 1 to 9, in 4 copies each). Tile no. 1 shows a bird called the "rice bird"
- 36 "dots" or "circles" (numbered 1 to 9, in 4 copies each).
- 36 "characters" (numbered 1 to 9, in 4 copies each)
- 12 "honours" (4 red dragons, 4 green, 4 white)
- 16 "winds" (4 East, 4 South, 4 West, 4 North)
+ 8 "supreme honours" (4 seasons and 4 flowers) which are added in the middle of a mahjong set. (The flowers are the plum blossom, the orchid, the chrysanthemum and the bamboo)
Among the tiles, a "bamboo" stands for the spear, a "circle" for the shield, and a "character" for the foot soldiers.
The winds of east, west, south and north stand for the generals guarding the four gates.
The character "zhong" 中 (red dragon) announces the commander; the "fa" 發 (green dragon) stands for the officer who delivers the commander's orders. The white tiles (white dragon) stand for the reserve forces.
The characters on the tiles
You handle these characters at every turn. Here is what they say.
| Suit | On the tile | Pinyin | Meaning | What is worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The characters | 萬 万 | wàn | ten thousand | Nine tiles, from 一萬 to 九萬. The number is engraved above the character; this is the only suit spelled out in words, and that is where its name comes from. The site's own article sees the foot soldiers in it. |
| The circles | 筒 | tǒng | tube; pipe | Nine tiles, from one to nine circles. The word names the end of a tube — a pierced coin seen face on. The site's own article sees the shield in it. |
| The bamboos | 索 | suǒ | rope | Nine tiles, from one to nine sticks. They are also called 条 tiáo, the measure word for long objects. The one is not drawn as a stick but as a bird — 幺鸡 yāojī, "the bird tile" in the site's dictionary. The site's own article sees the spear in the bamboo. |
| The winds | 東 南 西 北 东 南 西 北 | dōng nán xī běi | east, south, west, north | Four tiles, four copies of each. They give every player his seat and every round its name. The Chinese order of the compass points begins with east, not with north. |
| The dragons | 中 發 白 中 发 白 | zhōng fā bái | centre, prosperity, white | Red, green and white. 中 is engraved in red, 發 in green, and the white dragon is a bare tile — sometimes a plain blue frame. The name "dragon" comes from the American dealers of the 1920s; in Chinese these are not dragons at all. |
| The flowers | 梅 蘭 菊 竹 梅 兰 菊 竹 | méi lán jú zhú | plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, bamboo | Four unique tiles. They are the "four gentlemen" of scholar painting, a motif the site shows elsewhere. They are not kept in the hand: you lay them down and draw again. |
| The seasons | 春 夏 秋 冬 | chūn xià qiū dōng | spring, summer, autumn, winter | Four unique tiles, played like the flowers. Each answers to one wind, and the one that answers to yours doubles your points. |