Mahjong, A Classic Game

Mahjong, mah-jongg, majiang, or whatever you would like to spell it is a game of four (4) players that basically originated in China. It is a game of skill, intelligence, calculation and luck. In most countries, mahjong is often used in gambling.

If you're not familiar with mahjong, the closest game to it is the western card game called gin rummy. Both games involve selecting and discarding cards or tiles to score points by forming groups or runs of similar units.

In mahjong, the object is to build complete suits (usually of threes) from either 13th or 16th tiles. The person to achieve this goal is said to have won the game. Hence, the winning tile completes the set of either 14 or 17 tiles.

To give you a background of the equipment used in mahjong, there are six (6) types of suit tiles used, namely, the circle, bamboo character, wind, dragon and flower suits. In the Filipino way, we immediately disregard the wind, dragon and flower suits and considered all of them as flower tiles already.

In winning the game, we need to complete some sets, namely:

Pong - is a set of three (3) identical tiles
Kong or kang - is a set of four (4) identical tiles and must be immediately declared.
Chow - is a set of three (3) suited tiles in sequence. Unlike other sets, an exposed Chow may only be declared off the discard of the player on the left.
Eye - it consists of two (2) identical tiles and is the final component to the standard hand.

There are other special sets that would give excitement to the game and these are what we filipinos called "Escalera" and "Seven (7) Pairs".

Such game is very famous especially to older people. For our family, it is our way also of spending weekends with coins in replacing the chips and as part of the bet.