Mah-Jongg is a traditional Chinese game using illustrated tiles, with game play similarities to rummy. It is a popular gambling game, but wagering real stakes is by no means necessary to have fun playing.
The tiles consist of three suits numbering 1-9 (Dots, Numbers or Characters, and Bamboo, the "Ace" of which almost always looks like a bird), three different dragons (Red, Green, and White [white is unusual in that it may look like a silvery dragon, or like a picture frame, or blank - think "White dragon in a snowstorm"), and the four winds (east, south, west, and north). There are four copies of each tile. Special flower, season, and joker tiles may also be used.
Four players take turns drawing from a stock (the wall), or from the other players' discards, in an attempt to form sets of numeric sequences (e.g., 5-6-7 of the same suit, which can only be drawn from the player at one's left, by calling "Chow"), triplets and quadruplets (which can be drawn from the discards out-of-turn by calling "Pung"), pairs, and other patterns. "Pung" takes precedence over "Chow", and "Mah Jongg" (literally "I win!") takes precedence over all (and is the only situation one may draw "Chow" out-of-turn.) What happens if a single discard would give two (or more!) players "Mah Jongg"? Precedence goes to the player who would play next in normal sequence.
Originating in China in the mid-19th century, it was introduced to the U.S. in the 1920s. It is now played in different forms throughout Asia, Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. Although the rules for game play are fairly constant, there are an immense variety of scoring schemes. A few general categories of rule-sets include: Chinese Classical, Hong Kong Old Style, Japanese, Taiwanese, Western, and American.
dragonkong.com (real-time, real mahjong, multiplayer mahjong, English, Japanese and Chinese language. Chinese, HongKong and Japanese Riichi rules. A lot of every day tournaments and events.)
My Zung Jung (version 3.3) reference card that I use when I teach and play. Prints four-up, double sided, on a US letter-sized page. The front has all the scoring patterns, renamed to be a little more descriptive, with their point values. The back details rules such as scoring, the dead wall, passing the deal, and payment.
A summary of calls usable to most versions of Mahjong, as well as a scoring summary (used for Japanese Classical MJ), and a quick list of tiles for people whose sets don't have any Western characters on them.
Pattern/Points scoring reference card for playing the Zung Jung(tm) ("the Middle Way") Mahjong ruleset by Alan Kwan. Has also been adopted as World Series of Mahjong ruleset. Is shared for personal, individual, non-commercial use and enjoyment so long as copyright information remains intact.
A cheat sheet with numbers and winds as well as scoring for HK old style Mah Jong Scoring. Includes a proposed alternate (simplified) payout system.
Please feel free to comment and suggest any changes. And it is released under creative commons (share alike) so please feel free to take the file and do whatever you want with it and of course reupload it! =).
When we decide to get really down, here is our cheat sheet for Chinese International Style Mahjong, with all 81 hands. It is on a convenient 8 1/2" x 11" double-sided sheet that can be folded and kept during the game for reference. The hands are ordered by type. This has been our standard of play in our Mahjong League for the past three years.
My friends and I play Hong Kong Old Style with some variants added from HK New Style. This is a cheat sheet that we use to keep track of the hands. HKOS is one of the most widely played Mahjong variants. This is NOT a rule set, only a score card that lists all hands, the fan for complete scoring of a hand, and the conversion chart from fan to points to determine payout. Enjoy
A zipped file containing 30 tile sets for use with Berry Bloem's Mahjongg Game of Four Winds for PC. I scanned tiles from many sets in my collection to make these files (*.bmp files) compatible with the game, which has been around for a long time on various PC game compilation disks. To find out more about the game, go to http://www.mahjongg.com/
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