Well, friends, I bit the bullet and ordered my first mahjong tiles, and so far, I am delighted with them! These tiles are called “Spill the Tea” and are from
May Mahjong, which offers them in this pink colorway as well as a blue one. After a few mahjong lessons, I knew I wanted to incorporate some mahjong into my cozy mysteries (a perfect interest for my middle-aged characters), and that’s hard to do if you don’t know the game. I looked at mahjong tiles online for weeks and weeks, and fortunately, this set was moderately priced
and on sale for twenty percent off the day after Christmas, so I placed an order. Their customer service was great, and the set arrived on Tuesday!
This new interest started a few months ago when I overheard my Bible study friends Carol and Angela discussing mahjong. I mentioned that I would love to learn to play, and Carol and Angela generously agreed to teach about a dozen of us who wanted to learn the game. In addition to being just good clean fun, it’s also said to help with memory since we’re supposed to keep learning as we age. Count me in!
To be honest, though, I knew this was a complicated game, and I went to that first lesson with some trepidation. There is so much to learn, but Carol and Angela were patient teachers, and I felt like a real whiz when I came out of that first lesson knowing what dots, bams, and craks are. They are the three main suits in mahjong, kind of like hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades in cards.
“Dots” look like … dots. Unless you ignore the instructor’s advice to stick with a traditional set and get one of the themed sets instead. (In my defense, could I really have been expected
not to look for a set with some tea reference?) So my “dots” are teacups, and so far, I’m not confused by this.
“Bam” is short for “bamboo,” and these little green bamboo sticks make it easy for me to remember what a “bam” is.
“Crak” is a shortened form of the word “character,” and the Chinese “character” symbols are easy to spot.
“Winds” are marked for north, south, east, and west, and as a former news person, I always use them to spell “NEWS.”
There are also a few other tiles to learn, including the jokers, which in the case of this set, are monkeys with teacups. Delightful! Just learning the terms and getting familiar with them took up most of my first two lessons, but by lessons three and four, I was getting the hang of it and playing practice games with my friends, who are newbies just like I am, and I have been able to call “mahjong” twice so far, which is so encouraging.
Selecting a set of mahjong tiles from the many options available online can be exhausting, because mahjong is surging in popularity at the moment, and now that I've chosen a set, I’ve found a way to practice by myself in between mahjong meetups with friends. I’m reading a few helpful books on the game, and there are also YouTube videos that can help anyone learn to play. This set from May Mahjong also came with the pretty pink miniature dice that I’ve seen used, and there was a helpful card listing all the tiles, something I can use as a cheat sheet if needed.
I love that this new-to-me game is stretching my brain, and from a writing standpoint, I’m also figuring out which of my characters would do well at it. If you think you might be interested in learning mahjong, I feel compelled to tell you that all of these themed sets seem to sell out very quickly, so if you’ve got your eye on this one or another specific set, watch the company’s website, since most of them seem pretty good about telling you when a set is about to sell out. And if you do learn to play mahjong, I’d love to hear about it—we can compare notes!
