![]() People will talk during the game, that’s fine. The more dependent you can make them on their own draws they better a player they will be.Īnother house rule. If you can keep the dedicated teacher there and they’ll still maintain interest Ben recommends not introducing Pon. At that point they’ll be able to win fairly easily on their own. The very last step is to introduce Pon, which is “Tibet rules” and allows them to play on their own. Then depending on how people are doing, go to 10 tiles 2 suits or 13 tiles 2 suits. But they’ll do very well when you introduce a second suit, which will encourage them, since it’s nowhere near as hard as it looks. By the time they can handle seven they’ll feel that Mahjong is hard. People will think that introducing the second suit makes it harder but it actually makes it easier. Keep it one suit, which actually gets rather hard. Keep going, and introduce the new patterns. Keep going until everyone seems to have an understanding of what’s going on. It makes them want to win and it makes them remember the right words to say. It sticks because only the winner gets to say them so that helps things stay exciting. This gets them used to using foreign terminology. Teach them to do “ron” and “tsumo” from the beginning. The reason that it goes deep is because of the tile structure – this is what makes it a good game, this is what keeps people engaged in the game, this is what makes the game interesting. What’s interesting is that the tiles interact with each other in more complicated ways than you think. ![]() What’s interesting is the many ways to arrange the tiles in your hand. It’ll show them the things that can be interesting about the game right away. Get them starting to consider the multiple ways their hand can be broken down. This lets them start to see the basic patterns. Ask everyone if the winning tile was the only tile they could have won on. When someone wins, congratulate them and go through their hand to show why they won. Have everyone take four tiles, do it open, walk them through what happens. ![]() Four tile mahjong is a pair and then a set. Show everyone that there’s four of each and what each tile is. Start them off with four-tiles, only one suit (probably pin – always pin -> sou -> man). Leave all the tiles face-down in the center, when it comes to dealing and rebuilding, have them just pull from a pile. Take wall-building and all cosmetic stuff out as well as all ritual stuff. The following is the rules that Ben sent us:ĭon’t even make the wall. At PAX East, the large majority of the people that came back for intermediate and advance lessons, as well as those who came to buy mahjong sets, lesson books, and find out more information about mahjong after their lessons, came from the tables using a variety of these rules to teach. The beauty in these rules is that not only do they effectively teach people how to play mahjong, but also gets them quickly immersed in a game that they can immediately play and get better at, without having to jump through a set of convoluted rules. ![]() ![]() Throughout all of our teaching at PAX East, the biggest success came from a certain teaching style we learned from Benjamin Boas (Author and Mahjong playing American who lives in Japan), called the Tibet Rules. Over the course of three days, with only space for four mahjong tables (three used for teaching), we ended up teaching over 350 people through one hour “How to play Mahjong” sessions. A couple weeks ago, the USPML hosted a Mahjong booth at PAX EAST. ![]()
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