Mah-Jongg is a 2350 year-old Chinese game, which is played in Japan, too. It consists of 144 tiles bearing beautiful designs of dragons, flowers, seasons etc. More Asian versions exist with different number of tiles (Taiwanese), and the rules of the games vary from country to country. At the first WWW Mahjongg Museum you may indulge in the beauty of ancient and modern tile sets and read about the history of the game which had a renaissance and world-wide distribution in the 1920s.
The solitaire version of Mah-Jongg is available as a free computer game with the name Kyodai V.1.21, meaning "brothers and sisters [substitute]", which may be downloaded from this site. The very compact programme features superb graphics, and is running under Windows 95/98. The copyright is with Rene-Gilles Deberdt alias "Naoki Haga". More advanced versions of Kyodai with various layouts and suitable background music are sold by the author. The purpose of the game is to remove all randomly distributed tiles within different pre-defined 3-dimensional layouts from the board. The tiles must be removed in pairs: two tiles of the same sort (winds) or with identical number of points, or two season tiles, or two flower tiles. They have to be free on their left or right side, and not covered by other tiles, otherwise you can't remove them. The rules are simple and the game is extremely addictive.
Meanwhile several parlour versions for four players are available as computer games:
In my humble opinion, Mahjongg, the REAL Game by Berrie Bloem offers the best introduction for beginners both in text as in animation of tile exchange. Version V.1.12 (1996) runs from Windows 3.1, but more recent versions are available.
Four Winds Mahjongg V.1.10 (2000) by Arto Tenkanen, Jukka Aalto et al. is available as a 60 days trial version. When purchased and registered, it allows to choose from a variety of rule sets, and it provides an interesting alternative tile design "Bauhaus style".
A gorgeous Japanese workout is Access Girls (1998), the title of the game already being suggestive as a help to conquer hearts, whereas the original meaning probably was a hint to the feature that the unexperienced player may ask any of the co-player ladies for some advice during the game to get faster and better access to the rules and tactical approach. Indeed their appearance and demeanour is reminiscent of metropolitan red light districts, from where the game has got its dubious reputation. Japanese slang knowledge not taught at school is necessary to enable the connoisseur to fully savour the critical, encouraging and inflaming exclamations of the charmingly animated girls. To install the programme and read the menus, Windows 95/98 has to be upgraded with a Japanese language kit.
Finally, for computer assisted playing with four human participants, an internet version of the game is in development. At the moment, it follows Taiwanese rules only, but for internationalisation menus can be switched between Chinese and English. The NetMahjong beta test version is available from Min-Wei Wang. Don't despair, if nothing happens when you try to start the game: you must find your co-players for yourself and notify them about the time of playing and the host IP address to choose. In addition, there is a worldwide Matchmaking Page to assist you to make contact with NetMahjong players.
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