Ma Jiang is played by 4 players around a table. You get 13 (or sometimes 16) tiles of various values and various suits. A remaining wall (the Chinese are fascinated with their walls) of tiles stays in the middle for you to draw from. Here is a game in progress.
As I've described the basic play is very similar to most card games. The tiles make all the difference though. There is something cool about handling those tiles that a card hand can never achieve. The sound they make when "shuffling" them is pretty cool as well.
The set pictured above is very similar to the one we use. Although there are a few tiles I don't recognize.
There are many variations on the game but the basic idea is similar to each variation. In our variation to win you have to have four melds (3 of a kind, 4 of a kind or "run" of 3)in addition to 1 pair. The total is thus 14 tiles (13 in your hand plus the 14th one required to complete all the melds). There are additional requirements
1) One of them MUST be a 3 or 4 of a kind.
2) You must have a 1 OR 9 in one of your melds or pair.
There are other small intricacies about how you draw these tiles but that is the general idea.
The first to go out collects money from everyone else based on some very complicated schemes which always seem to leave me paying much more than everyone else (ie. dealer pays double if they lose, you pay double if you give the winning tile etc).
It looks remarkably complex when you first start to play and there are times when you think you might never get it. We found that after 3 or 4 games we were proficient enough to play but were very slow compared to the Chinese.
I'm hooked .. plain and simple.
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