Mah Jong

Mah Jong: Monday and Friday afternoon

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Have you ever fancied going on a quest for Buried Treasure, one where encountering a dragon or three is a positive advantage and you run no risk of being burnt to a crisp? Would you like to aim at something even harder, indeed well nigh impossible – Plucking the Plum-Blossom from the Roof or Plucking the Moon from the Bottom of the Sea?

Then come along to the Wimborne U3A Mah Jong Group. Take part in the Twittering of the Sparrows. Learn how to construct the Great Wall of China properly, so as to keep out all evil spirits. Shout out strange cries like “Pow!” and “Pung!”, as if you were a character in an old Batman episode. Discover the intricacies of Knitting and Fishing, the ingredients of a Goulash and the importance of Prevailing Winds – no, you haven’t accidentally come on the wrong course!

This is the second year that there’s been a Wimborne U3A Mah Jong group, and for all of the present members it’s the first time Mah Jong has been played on a regular basis. Most were complete beginners. So there’s a complete lack of pressure and a lot of laughter as they all learn together, and it’s an ideal opportunity for other beginners to join the group. (Experienced players would of course be equally welcome – and could teach the rest a thing or two!)

Photo
© S Hawksworth U3A

There are a couple of pitfalls for the unwary beginner.

From the European perspective, the Chinese seem to view everything back to front. (Something to do with living at the opposite side of the globe from us perhaps!) Thus play proceeds in a counterclockwise direction, rather than clockwise, and although as in Bridge the players are named after the points of the compass, in Mah Jong East and West have swapped places, and West has South to his left and North to his right.

But it takes a surprisingly short time for this and the other procedures and expressions to seem quite familiar and natural – while sorting out the scoring, and who owes whom what (in points, not money) at the end of each round, does wonders for one’s arithmetical skills!

And it’s not plain sailing either for a newcomer to a Mah Jong group who has played before, elsewhere, since there are quite major differences between the rules, according to whether one plays the game Chinese-style, or according to the authorities of America or Britain or Japan or Malaysia, etc. So an agreement as to what is permissible and possible among this particular set of players needs to be reached before the start of play.

But this is equally true, of course, of games like Rummy or Bridge (with all its different conventional bids).

Easier than chess, harder than backgammon, and much more picturesque than either, both visually and verbally (as you may gather from the opening paragraphs), Mah Jong is a game of mingled chance and skill for four players, originating in 19th century China and hugely popular there still, but now played all over the world and indeed online. Its nearest equivalents are probably card games like Gin Rummy or Canasta, but Mah Jong is played with small engraved or painted tiles made from wood and/or ivory, rather than cards, and a casual observer might be fleetingly reminded of other very different popular games – Snap, Scrabble, even Lego!

The tiles vary in appearance considerably from set to set, are often strikingly beautiful and give the game much of its charm. Some of them have Chinese letters or numbers on, others just pictures, but they all have English notation as well, to make life easy for us, just as the terminology, apart from a very few calls, is in delightfully quaint translation.