Many game lovers the world over know what you are speaking of when you mention the game Mahjong to them. However, many of these ideas of Mahjong are adaptations from the real game. Mahjong, as we know it today, started as a different game to what game fans play on their computers of mobile phones. If you delve into the history of your favourite tile matching game, you may find a very different origin to what you ever thought possible. Mahjong has come a long way from its more humble beginnings and continues to grow on popularity today.

In the beginning

Mahjong is originally a Chinese game designed for four players. A Korean version of the original game makes provision for three players.  Mahjong is a game involving a certain degree of luck but also strategy, skill and precise calculation. Depending on the type of Mahjong game you are playing, luck can be a large or a small factor of it. Mahjong is popular as a gambling game in Asia, for the game a hand of 13 or 16 tiles is dealt to each player. The number of tiles dealt per hand depends on the version of Mahjong being played. As each player’s turn comes around, they draw and discard one tile. The goal is to make four or five melds and a pair. The number of melds again depends of the variation of Mahjong being played and the pair can also be referred to as a ‘head’. How the game is won is by drawing a new or a discarded tile that completes the player’s hand, thus the saying that winning in ‘on the draw’. In the end a winning hand will contain not 13 or 16 tiles but 14 or 17.

This may seem like a far cry from the computer and internet based Mahjong games, popular among the western cultures.

The Game Today

Today there are all sorts of exciting and intriguing versions of Mahjong available for computer and mobile phone users. However, these games involve selecting matching pairs of tiles from a stack until the board is cleared. A distant relation to its original beginnings.

In other parts of the world, Mahjong is the most popular table game in Japan as of 2010 and it is still extensively played in China. While the western world may sometimes classify the game as a domino game because of the solid tiles used, Mahjong in its traditional form is far more closely related to western card games such like rummy.

Around the world, varying interest is taken in the original games and tournaments and competitions are held. These tournaments and competitions are more prevalent in Asia and the east, where the game originates, than in the western culture.

Mahjong has taken on different forms along with all the different countries it is now played in. There are now as many as 14 variations of the original Chinese game available in countries as widespread as Korea and the United States of America.