Tabletop Time Machine
C 1800 MAH JONG
Mah Jong is basically ancestral Rummy played with bamboo tiles instead of flexible cards. The tiles bear fanciful Chinese designs, broadly divisible into three suits numbered one to nine plus a number of ‘honours’. The method of play is by draw and discard with a view to collecting melds (matched sets of tiles) and to ‘go out’ by shedding all the tiles from your hand. In the western world the game came into vogue in America in the 1920s, during which period the modern western rules were finalised. Mah Jong is played all over the world with a variety of different rulesets, but for a basic description of the modern British game see ttgami.ng/majhongrules