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Message:: [QUOTE="Shangas, post: 10005016, member: 360"]The game? No, not difficult to learn. I've been doing it since I was 14, 15 years old. So...over 20 years by now. My friends and I used to play in the library at school during lunchtime. That said, there are MANY versions of the game. American Mahjong, Filipino Mahjong, Singaporean Mahjong, Japanese Mahjong, Taiwanese Mahjong...the list goes on. There's at least half a dozen different styles. It can make the question "Do you play mahjong?" kinda hard to answer - because you gotta be REALLY specific about WHICH TYPE you play. The type that most Chinese people will play, if you mention "mahjong" is what's known as "Cantonese Mahjong, AKA "Hong-Kong Mahjong", which is the most common type among Chinese communities. If you go to a major Chinese community in Chinatown or whatever, they're probably playing that. That's what I play with my friends. The basics are easy enough. (These rules are for traditional Hong Kong mahjong)... You have a set of tiles dealt out to you (13 tiles) and this is your "hand". The game is a take-and-discard, going around a square table in anticlockwise direction. The aim of the game is to build a winning hand of four melds (four groupings of tiles) and one pair (two matching tiles). The first person to build that winning hand (14 tiles), wins the game. Been played that way since the game was invented back about 1840, 1850-odd. First Western exposure to mahjong was in the 1850s and 60s. The oldest mahjong sets that still exist TODAY (which are both in museums) were taken back to the States by an American diplomat, presumably as a souvenir of his time in China, and those dated to the 1870s.[/QUOTE]

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