Welcome to The Mahjong Masters blog! Where we will try to provide information on mahjong. Everything from basics to some tricks that may come in useful!
Styling a Mahjong Night for the Camera
One warm light source, no more than three colours, and tiles caught mid-game: a photographer's shot list for a mahjong night that looks good on camera.
Why one mahjong table can hold a child and a grandparent: face-up discards, short hands, honest luck, and how to pitch, seat and pace a mixed-age game night.
Seat wind or prevalent wind? Which way the deal travels, a hand-by-hand rotation map, what tables do after a washout, and how to keep the round straight.
A plain-English tour of what mahjong is made of: the tile set, the melds, how hands, rounds and games fit together, and what changes between the main variants.
Hong Kong, riichi, MCR, Chinese Classical and Taiwanese all count value differently. What separates the systems, and how to settle on one at your own table.
Agree the rule set, count the tiles and plan three hours. A host's run sheet for a mahjong night at home, with the kit list, food rules and Sydney hire costs.
Mahjong runs on one loop: draw or claim, then discard. How turns pass, what chow, pung and kong each demand, who wins a contested tile, and how a hand ends.
Every mahjong table opens the same way: fix the seats, wash and stack the walls, roll the dice to break, then deal. The whole sequence, worked through.
From Lust, Caution to Crazy Rich Asians, directors use the mahjong table as a staging device. Six screen scenes read the way a player reads them, not a viewer.
Western Mahjong Rules: How the American Game Works
Western mahjong, the American game: the annual card of legal hands, the Charleston, claiming discards, joker rules, dead hands and why the card rules all.
Two games, one family of tiles: how Chinese and Western mahjong differ in goal, jokers, the Charleston, scoring and pace, with a side-by-side comparison table.
Mahjong for Beginners: Your First Game, Step by Step
What a winning hand looks like, how a turn works, when to claim a discard, and a sample hand played out turn by turn before you sit down to your first game.
Every tile in a mahjong set explained: the coin-and-string money logic behind the three suits, plus what the winds, dragons, flowers and seasons stand for.
Mahjong is younger than the sewing machine, its suits are old Chinese money, and solitaire is not mahjong at all. Ten facts, and the evidence behind each.
Mahjong is far younger than the legends claim. Follow it from Chinese money-suited cards to the 1920s Western craze, Japan's parlours and modern tournaments.
