The Game of Mahjong
Mahjong is one of China’s most popular games, and, along with its food, also one of its most popular cultural exports. For those entirely unfamiliar with the game, a quick overview: mahjong is a game played with four players and a set of mahjong tiles, usually a little larger and thicker than western dominoes. The tiles are divided into three different types: suits, honors and flowers. There are three suits – circles, bamboo and characters – each numbered one through nine. The honor tiles include the four wind tiles, each printed with one of the four cardinal directions, and three dragon tiles, one printed with the character zhong , one with fa and one with a simple square, called the white (bai) tile. The game has a number of complex rules for shuffling and dealing tiles, designed to make cheating as difficult as possible.
In its essence, mahjong is something like gin rummy, with players drawing and discarding tiles and trying to create melds of three or four of a kind or three in a row of the same suit. There are two important differences however: points and betting. Some mahjong hands get no points and some get many, based on how difficult the hand is to make. These points carry over from one round to the next until the game is over. Also, money is wagered at the beginning of a round and once the round is finished money is doled out according to points.
History
Popular myth connects mahjong to Confucius, asserting that its appearance in various parts of China corresponds with Confucius’s travels. According to this myth, the three dragon tiles (zhong, fa, and bai) correspond to the three cardinal virtues taught by Confucius (benevolence, sincerity, and filial piety). It’s highly unlikely that this is accurate, as the game rules would have changed so much that it would effectively be a different game today if it had been around for so long (1).
Evidence suggests that the game was actually invented during the 19th century. Its development was probably influenced by existing card and tile games. One game in particular, Madiao was played with forty cards, numbered 1 to 9 in four different suits along with four extra flower cards. This configuration is quite similar to modern Mahjong, so it's believed that Madiao may have had some influence. As to who created the game and where, there are many conflicting theories, even among the camp that agrees that the game was invented sometime after 1850. In the end, there's no way to be certain (1).
By the early twentieth century, the game was roaringly popular all over China. In 1949 the communist government of the newly established People's Republic of China banned mahjong as part of its larger ban on gambling in general. After the Cultural Revolution, the game was revived and it has more than regained its former popularity, though there are still restrictions on gambling in China and high stakes games are not allowed (1).
Mahjong for Export
It seems that not long after its invention and rise to popularity in China, Mahjong became a phenomenon in the West. Mention of the game first appeared in an anthropology paper written by an American man named Stewart Culin in 1895. Soon there were rule books written in a number of languages, including French, English and Japanese. Every time the game appeared in a new country and gained popularity there, some of its rules were changed. Thus, there are now completely different American, Japanese, and British versions of the game. But purists still look to China for the "real" Mahjong.
Variations
So called "classical" or "standard" mahjong is played with a set of 144 tiles and each player is dealt 13 tiles. The Taiwanese variation uses 16 tile hands. Rarer versions of the game involve sets of 136, 148 or 152 tiles.
The rules of mahjong differ wildly from region to region. Some versions use joker or wild tiles, others don't. Some versions award points for being only one tile short of a full set at the end of the round, others don't. Some versions require that you form not only a standard mahjong hand to win the round, but that the hand have a point value. The details of wagering and winning money differ according to different point values assigned to different hands. Different versions also differ in how the dealer position is rotated. Basically, there are so many different versions of the game that players must usually discuss and agree on the rules before they start playing.
Innovations
Online mahjong has been around in Asia for awhile through gaming portals like FunTown, which operates the world's largest online mahjong gaming site in terms of revenue (2). Mahjong may soon be making its presence felt on the worldwide internet gambling stage; Carmen Media, owner of a number of online casinos, recently signed a deal with GigaMedia to use their mahjong software (2). Major players in the online gambling world have high hopes that online mahjong will soon explode in popularity in Asia in the same way that online poker has in the West.
