I travelled with Milo on Friday evenning to Sam's family estate near Merigomish.
On Saturday learned that Amy and Oakar both play Mahjong in Charlottetown They know Chinese rules but are also learning Riichi Mahjong by playing Mahjong Soul online.. Milo was interested in learning so we were all excited about a game. I felt relaxed to share the responsibility for teaching the game to Milo with Amy and Oakar. At first I tried reading my terse explanation from the Rules page on this site, but it isn't as easy to jump from the description of the game to making sense of play. Thankfully Amy was willing to jump in and provide lots more explanation. We started setting up for an East-only round, (half of a full game).
Milo didn't want to play and open hand and prefered to just jump directly in. That was probably a good idea as it meant the rest of us played more naturally. Anyways, Milo is a board game instructor and was naturally very quick to pick up on the names of tiles and the objective of play. We drew from the four tile pushing sticks (which have direction characters imprinted on them) to choose our starting dealer. Milo drew the East (Higashi) stick and so we instructed them on their responsibility as "parent". Of course the first hand was slow, and to make matters worse, not one of us was able to even acheive a ready hand (tempai) This meant the hand ended in an "exhaustive draw" which meant we would have to repeat it, with Milo as dealer/parent again.
We discussed the funny rule in Japanese play that says if the dealer starts the hand by discarding a wind, and all three children (non-dealers) discard the same wind on their first turns respectively, the hand is cancelled and the wall must be knocked down and rebuilt. I declared that I would prefer to ignore this rule if the situation arose since it's a nuisance to have to rebuild the whole wall without even having played out the hand.
I wish I could tell you the results of the rest of the game. I know however that poor Oakar dealt-in twice. But I also believe he won at least one hand by Ron as well. I was lucky enough to win the round, which pleased me since I was afraid if I lost, it would lead the other players to doubt that I was a reliable teacher of the rules. ;-) Milo recorded our final plus/minus scores and it so happened that they had "broken even" with a final plus/minus of zero. "Just like Miyanaga Saki!!" I said. Of course then I had to explain the story of Saki from the Manga I read that most recently sparked my new obsession with Mahjong. But instead of explaining that story all over again here, I will just give you a link to watch Saki for yourself:
You can enjoy the magic and drama of high school girls competitive Manga for yourself by watching this live action portrayal of Saki (complete with English subtitles, on the Internet Archive.†
Please enjoy!
Love Hana-jo
† The Internet Archive is truly one of the great modern treasures of the digital commons and we should all appreciate it and protect it as well as we can!