Mah-jong
Mahjong
 |
| Players |
3 or 4 |
| Setup time |
1–5 minutes |
| Playing time |
Dependent on variation and/or house/tournament rules |
| Random chance |
Yes |
| Skill(s) required |
Tactics, observation, memory, teamwork |
Mahjong ( mah-ZHONG, Mandarin pronunciation: [mä˧˥tɕjɑŋ˧˩]) is a tile-based game that originated in China during the Qing dynasty. It is commonly played by four players (with some three-player variations found in South Korea and Japan). The game and its regional variants are widely played throughout Eastern and South Eastern Asia and have a small following in Western countries. Similar to the Western card game rummy, Mahjong is a game of skill, strategy, and calculation and involves a degree of chance.
The game is played with a set of 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols, although some regional variations may omit some tiles and/or add unique tiles. In most variations, each player begins by receiving 13 tiles. In turn players draw and discard tiles until they complete a legal hand using the 14th drawn tile to form 4 melds (or sets) and a pair (eye). A player can also win with a small class of special hands. There are fairly standard rules about how a piece is drawn, how a piece is robbed from another player, the use of simples (numbered tiles) and honors (winds and dragons), the kinds of melds allowed, how to deal the tiles and the order of play. Despite these similarities, there are many regional variations to the rules including rather different scoring systems, criteria for legal winning hands and even private table rules which distinguish some variations as notably different styles of mahjong.
In Chinese, the game was originally called 麻雀 (pinyin: máquè)—meaning sparrow— which is still used in some languages. Most Mandarin-speaking Chinese now call the game 麻将（májiàng）, which is a homonym of one way to refer to sesame paste. It is pronounced mah-ZHONG in English which is an approximation of the pronunciation in Mandarin.
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