Overview

Mhing is a multiplayer card game based on the ancient game of Mah Jong. As you might expect, then, it's in the rummy family and would feel right at home to players of either rummy/canasta/gin or players of Mah Jong. Key differences from Mah Jong include the use of cards instead of tiles, obviously, but also the inclusion of rules that easily accommodate a wide range of players. In addition, though I'm not at all familiar with Mah Jong, I'm fairly certain the scoring and hand combinations are a little more limited and strict in Mhing than in Mah Jong.

The game itself plays very well and grows on you over time as you begin to understand the way in which the variety of scoring combinations fit together. In this way, it feels a bit like Cribbage, where you begin to see subtle ways to earn more points than your opponent--through hedging your bets with a discard, playing to peg and prevent the opponent from pegging, and keeping cards looking for a good cut rather than keeping the single best four-card hand--only after a good many plays of the game. If you're not a traditional card game player, it's unlikely you'll find much of interest here. If you enjoy any games in the rummy family and traditional card games in general, this is almost a sure thing.

Components

The components to the most common "black box" edition of Mhing (no clue on the "Suntex" publication with the dragon on the front) are wonderful. You receive a massive deck of cards, as far as I know almost identical to a set of Mah Jong tiles (I think the "seasons" are the only thing missing... but I don't know what that means, and I think Mhing's "flowers" might substitute for them). The artwork on the cards is really really nice, and has a bit of that kind of gold-leaf effect that Saint Petersburg has on its cards. You'll be shuffling and handling the cards a lot, but they hold up well.

Other components include a number of player aids, including a number of full-color sheets that describe the various scoring combinations you can make and give examples of each, as well as a separate card describing the [rather awkward] actual scoring system. These help both in teaching and in playing the game. You'll also get a nice plastic tray for holding the draw stack and discard pile, if you're into that sort of organization. Finally, you have a box of small plastic chips (about the size and texture of Citadels' gold coins) in three colors (these are used for the advanced / betting rules for scoring). Everything is very high quality and built to last.

Gameplay

The object of Mhing is to be the first player to play down all of your cards, in the precise combination of four sets of three cards (can be either exact triplets or suited runs) and one pair. Every winning hand will consist of four sets and a pair. The first player to make this combination and lay it down will win the hand immediately and receive points. No one else will score anything. Like Tichu, which also has an incentive to be the first player to play down all of your cards, there are some other things to be thought about that prevent the game from being merely a race to meld (something that is common in a lot of rummy family games).

Scoring in Mhing is based on particular combinations of the four sets and pair that you meld with. For example, you get one "credit" if all of your sets are runs instead of triplets, or vice-versa, rather than having mixed-up sets. You get three credits if you have three sets that run 1-2-3, 4-5-6, and 7-8-9 in one of the three suits. And so on and so on. There are about two dozen different scoring combinations, each earning the player a number of credits from one to eight. Many of the scoring combinations can be stacked on top of each other to boost the hand's score. For example, the "royal run" of 1-2-3, 4-5-6, 7-8-9 could also be part of a "sequences [runs] only" hand (I described both of these in my earlier examples), earning four credits total. The stacking of combinations is the heart and soul of the game.

As you play through a hand, you'll almost inevitably find that it's harder than you thought it would be to make your hand into something good. There is a lot of min-maxing, cutting of losses, and short-term vs. long-term strategy that comes into play. Since only one person can meld and score each hand, there can be a very strong tension between one player looking to build up a high-scoring hand, and another player just looking for a few points to go out and stop the other player from capitalizing on a good hand that they were dealt. Like most traditional card games, there is a good bit of direct interaction and confrontation between the players, and it behooves you to pay very close attention to what your opponents are doing. In Mhing, in fact, this is probably even more true than in most other traditional games, as I'll explain soon.

As in Canasta, probably the most well-known rummy-family cousin to Mhing / Mah Jong, there are specific rules that determine when a player can pick up an opponent's discard. However, unlike Canasta, a player in Mhing may pick up anyone's discard as long as they follow these rules. This makes careful discarding much more important and forces you to pay attention to the play of every player, rather than just the one to your left as you often do in many rummy games (Phase 10, for example, as a particularly egregious example). The only caveat for picking up a discard is that you must play it down on the table immediately as one of your four required sets (your pair is always your last thing to play, and only when you're going out), and that you must (in general) allow players closer in turn order to the discarding player to take the card first if they also want it.

The out-of-turn picking-up of a discard works much more effectively to spice up the pace of the game than do, for example, the "skip" cards in Phase 10, another closely-related cousin in the rummy family. It also pushes the tension of the go-out-as-soon-as-possible and build-up-as-many-points-as-possible opposing goals to a head rather volcanically. It's one thing to try to build up a high-scoring hand when you're getting lots of turns to pick up new cards and discard your trash, but it's quite another when the other players are consistently picking up each other's discards and laying down three or four of their required sets and putting their short-term goals [literally] on the table. The game has frenetic changes of pace, with rounds switching constantly between players quietly picking up and discarding to players grabbing up each other's discards, often to the detriment of their own scoring potential, to prevent an opponent from piecing together a killer combo.

With the only-one-player-scores rule (different from almost every other rummy family game, where even players who don't manage to meld their entire hand still get some consolation prize, often higher than the player who did go out), the tension between waiting to build up points and hoping to just get something, and the ability to skip over other players by picking up a discard out of turn (since you discard, and play shifts immediately to the player on your left, skipping anyone in between you and the discarder), Mhing is a much more confrontational game than most traditional card games, especially in the fairly passive rummy family. There are plenty of opportunities for screwing up your opponents, which, on account of their subtlety and unexpectedness, are much more fun than merely playing a skip card or a black 3. The gameplay is always interesting and dynamic, which is more than can be said of most rummy games, which usually follow a preset pattern. The addition of the advanced scoring rules, which I'll describe next, ups this dynamism to an even higher plane.

Scoring

In general, you score more "points" the more "credits" you manage to make in your hand. And, you get more "credits" the more of the different scoring combinations you can manage to stack on top of each other. The points you receive start at 2, and double first with every additional credit, and later (past at total of four credits) with every additional three credits. It's a rather strange scoring system, but it works out well in that it gives plenty of incentive, through the exponential growth, to wait for higher scoring combos since they're worth sometimes as much as a dozen low-scoring hands. Even under the basic scoring rules where you just set a point target and play 'til someone hits it, it's entirely possible for a player to win the game in one hand. This "clear and [ever-]present danger" makes the tension between going out of cards to grab anything you can get and waiting for that game-breaking hand even higher. Add in the next topic, and it gets even better.

There is included in the rules an advanced / "betting" version of the scoring system. Under this system, every player starts off with an equal number of points (we usually use 256), and instead of the winning player of a hand simply racking up points in their individual total, they are paid the point value of their hand by each opponent, effectively tripling, or more, their hand's value. Furthermore, if they picked up a discard to go out, the player who laid that card must pay double the hand value of the melding player's hand. This can lead to some crazy point swings, as you can imagine, and they make big hands even more deadly. The advanced rules, as written, say to play until only one player has chips remaining, but we usually play until either only one or two players have chips, and count the player with the most chips at that point as the winner (this kind of rule, as an off-topic bunny trail, would probably vastly improve the old game of Monopoly). Players who run out of chips still play, but don't pay anything out.

Conclusion

Mhing is a timeless game that can be enjoyed by almost anyone. If you like traditional card games, it's hard to imagine you not finding something to like about Mhing. If you like set collection, but find rummy (and, especially, the icky modern version, Phase 10) to be too passive, lifeless, and flat, Mhing offers a wonderfully dynamic reincarnation of classic set collection goals. If you like Mah Jong, Mhing offers you very similar game play that scales from 2 all the way up to 8 players (although 3-6 is probably the most playable range, any count within which is perfectly doable). If you like games with subtle strategies that reveal themselves to you only after years of play, Mhing can give you that as well.

The only conceivable deal-breakers I can imagine would be a dislike of traditional-style card games or a dislike of games in which the pace of the game and the importance of decisions varies widely (sometimes, in Mhing, many turns, or even hands, will go by without much happening, but it's balanced out by the frantic pace of hands where every discard is picked up or two players are fighting to finish off a monster combo). Barring those, I can't imagine why anyone out there wouldn't enjoy Mhing at least as an occasional break from their standard card game fare.