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What is Mahjong?

Mahjong is a popular game of Chinese origin. Despite wild claims of ancient history of thousands of years, mahjong was created in China around 1850. The game first became popular in Western world in the 1920's, and has been more or less popular ever since.

Mahjong is closely related to the rummy card games, but instead of playing cards, it's played with tiles. The game itself is very much like rummy: players draw tiles and try to form winning combinations in their hands. If a player doesn't win on her turn, she must then discard a tile. This draw-and-discard flow is familiar from almost any rummy game.

What makes mahjong special is the tiles and the winning hands. In many Western rummy games, losing players are penalized for the cards they are left with. In mahjong, the winner scores according to the quality of her hand. It's possible to go for a quick exit with a small hand or aim for a major score!

Find beautiful Mahjong sets on eBay

Mahjong sets are often very beautiful and a pleasure to just look and touch. You can find plenty of very nice sets from eBay. Many Asian sellers sell mahjong sets for very low prices - just notice they often add very heavy shipping costs (I guess they're trying to avoid eBay fees by charging a large part of the price of the product in the shipping costs).

A word of warning: ivory mahjong sets are very rare. If something is advertised as ivory, it's likely cow or fish bone, and possibly even plastic. A cheap set is never ivory. One should never buy ivory sets unless you can see the set with your own eyes (and can recognise ivory from other bones!). Also, importing ivory may cause serious problems with customs officials - importing elephant ivory to most countries is strictly illegal.

How to choose a mahjong set - some basic points to consider

• Which variant you are going to play? The key question is whether you want to play American mahjong or some other variant. If you're going to play the American game (the NMJL version), you need a set with 8 jokers and a total of 152 or 166 tiles: see American mah-jongg sets. Most Asian sets have only four jokers, if any, so you can't play the American game with them. If you want to play Japanese Riichi game, you probably want a set with the red fives, so look for a Japanese set. Otherwise it doesn't matter which set you get, they're all compatible.
• Do you need Western indices? If you're not familiar with the Chinese characters used in the tiles, you might want tiles with Arabic numbers. Otherwise the Character tiles will cause some problems. Even if you can play with the Chinese numbers, what about the people you play with? Some players despise the Western indices in tiles, but for a casual player, they're a must. When buying Asian mahjong sets, check if there are indices if you need them.
• Which material? To be honest, in most cases this doesn't really matter. Plastic is most widely available and frankly the best material there is, if you're looking for a basic set to use for playing. It's durable, so the tiles can take some beating without getting damaged and the plastic sets look good, too. In any case, plastic is also the most common option available, finding something else takes some effort. Choose plastic, at least for your first set. In any case I suggest avoiding bamboo and wooden sets, at least if they're cheap. Bone and bamboo sets are nice.

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