The game has taken on a number of trademarked names, such as "Pung Chow" and the "Game of Thousand Intelligences". Mahjong nights in America often involved dressing and decorating rooms in Chinese style. [37] Several hit songs were recorded during the Mahjong fad, most notably "Since Ma Is Playing Mah Jong" by Eddie Cantor. [38] When a hand is one tile short of winning (for example: , waiting for: , , or , as can be the eyes), the hand is said to be a ready hand, or more figuratively, "on the pot". The player holding a ready hand is said to be waiting for certain tiles. It is common to be waiting for two or three tiles, and some variations award points for a hand that is waiting for one tile. In 13-tile mahjong, the largest number of tiles for which a player can wait is 13 (the thirteen wonders, or 13 orphans, a nonstandard special hand). Ready hands must be declared in some variations of mahjong, while other variations prohibit the same. Many variations have specific hands, some of which are common while some are optional depending on regions and players. One example is the Pure Green hand made of chows or pongs using 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 of bamboo and green dragon.

In Japanese mahjong, rules allow abortive draws to be declared while tiles are still available. They can be declared under the following conditions: The meld must be in absolute numerical sequence and all in the same suit. Players cannot skip numbers or meld from the 8 or 9 to 1 or 2. Honors tiles cannot be used to make chows because they have no numerical value, and bonus tiles (flowers and seasons) also cannot be used to make a chow. Modern mah-jongg sets are usually made of plastic instead of bone or ivory. A full set contains 136 or 144 tiles, depending on whether the flowers or seasons are used. Some sets include 20 flowers. Mahjong serves as a minor plot point in the 2016 Arrival where General Shang uses the game to interact with the aliens.In many variations the dealer receives no scoring bonus and does not maintain their turn by winning or a dead hand.

Martin Wedel Jacobsen European mahjong champion". Mahjongnews.com. 20 June 2007. Archived from the original on 27 February 2012 . Retrieved 7 September 2012. You have 14 tiles and you get Mahjong by getting all 14 tiles into four sets and one pair. Sets of tiles are called pung or chow and they equal: Depending on the variation, two or three dice are usually used to decide what part of the wall to start dealing from. They are six-sided dice, traditionally but not necessarily Chinese dice with red one and four pips. A winning hand must include an agreed minimum amount of faan value (often 3). Some examples of scoring include: Shenyang mahjong using 13 hands in a game, and Shenyang mahjong has a very fast speed on playing. Also in Shenyang mahjong, the player must have bamboos, characters, circles and number 1 or 9 in their hand. In addition, the players have to pong before they chow, [ clarification needed] so there is no chance to win even if some players win at the first time they have their hands in hand.While the basic rules are more or less the same throughout mahjong, the greatest divergence between variations lies in the scoring systems. Like the rules, there is a generalized system of scoring, based on the method of winning and the winning hand, from which Chinese and Japanese base their roots. American mahjong generally has greatly divergent scoring rules, as well as greatly divergent general rules. Next priority goes to the player who declares a pong or kong using the discard. A player who calls for a pong or kong may take the discard from any other player. Only one player can be in this position because there are only four of any tile in a mahjong set.

WITH VIDEO: 'Mahjong!' Ancient game enjoys continued popularity". The Courier. Archived from the original on 24 July 2018.of any suit (that is, 1 to 9 plus two additional 1s and 9s); any one extra piece of the same suit suffices to win. This hand always has 4 melds (either 1 pong and 3 chows or 2 pongs and 2 chows, depending on the extra) and the eyes. In the example below, there are two pongs (111 and 999), two chows (234 and 678), and the extra 5 forms the eyes.

ONLY THE YOUNG: EXPERIMENTAL ART IN KOREA, 1960S–1970S GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS ISBN: 9780892075614The Mahjong game has two different versions: the traditional Asian version, which is a game for 4 players, and Mahjong Solitaire, which is always played by one person and is mostly popular in the West, this is the game you can play online on Mahjong-Game.com. In classical mahjong all players score points. Points are given for sets and hand composition and winning bonuses, doubled and redoubled for basic patterns. Sometimes a loser may score more points than a winner. Japanese mahjong has a complex scoring system with several stages of scoring, rules and exceptions, evening out scores and bonus points at the end of a match. Korean mahjong has a simple scoring system where only winner scores without any form of doubling. It is not necessary to know the names or the Chinese characters of each bonus tile, only the number, as this is associated with a specific direction, and the player receives bonus points when the bonus tile matches the seat direction. There is no relation between the bonus tile "bamboo" flower and the bamboo suit of suited tiles (e.g. 4 bamboo). In traditional Chinese culture, the Four Gentlemen are the plum (winter), orchid (spring), bamboo (summer), and chrysanthemum (autumn) which are regarded as the representative plants of those seasons, but people regard it as plum blossom (spring), orchid (summer), chrysanthemum (autumn) and bamboo (winter) now.