mmmmmm-mah jongg!

My friend, Anne, got me playing mah jongg about a year ago and I'm hooked.  I love getting together with this group of women (and sometimes a man or two).  We'll chat about our lives, but mostly just talk smack to each other while playing the game.

Also fun is all the different mah jongg sets out there.  They can be all sorts of colors or have different patterns or pictures on the back.  Me?  I went with the gold glitter ones. 

To play, you turn all of the tile face-down in the middle of the table and shuffle them by moving them around to break up any patterns from the previous hand.

Next, you line up the tiles in front of your rack in a double row.  As you play, you push out each row counter-clockwise and from there you draw your next tile.  Then you save or discard the tiles as needed to match them up with one of the patterns in the little booklet.  When you have them all matched up, you call out "mah jongg!"

Usually it takes until the last row for someone to get mah jongg.  Here's my first winning hand of the night with just a few tiles left to go!  If you click on the picture and squint, you can see that I was matching the pattern in the second section of the middle of the card.  I had never tried to match this particular pattern before, but it worked!  Gotta say, I play a mean game of mahj.

Mary Beth won next when we were still only halfway through the third row.  That's impressive.  When you call for mah jongg, you put all of your tiles on the top of your rack so everyone can check your work.  This picture is still from my perspective (with my oh-so-close hand!).  MB's winning hand is on the right and all of our discarded tiles are in the center.

Emerson and I had a thing at the end of last year where I would go "eeeeeee-YAH!" and she would giggle and mimic me.  One time I changed this to "mmmmmmmm-MAH JONGG!" and well, that was a winner.  For months, whenever I saw her she would say "mmmmmmmmm-MAH JONGG!" at me to goad me into playing the game with her.  When I decided to write this post,I thought it would be fun to get a video of her saying it.  And, of course, that was the day that she had no interest in our game at all.  This was the best I got out of her:



And why was she so distracted?  Because I had brought over a bubble maker.  Mah jongg is fun and all, but it doesn't hold a candle to bubbles!