Mahjong from A to Zhú
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- £4.49
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- £4.49
Publisher Description
From the most common Chinese traditions to the most arcane, this text contains over forty different Mahjong variants with detailed explanations and hand illustrations to appeal to beginners and masters alike. Ever wondered what else these beautiful tiles can do? Also included are games like Meow Meow Mahjong, Sap Tim Pun, Ten Phases, fortune telling and more. Tom Sloper of Sloperama Productions writes "Scott Miller has amassed an impressive amount of information about a great many mah-jongg variants. This is a work that all scholars and researchers of mah-jongg and games will need to add to their libraries. It's a valuable resource that's sure to add some branches to the family tree of mah-jongg."
Customer Reviews
Decent overview but not enough detail to play an actual game
The book covers some of the different variants of Mahjong but in an extremely brief fashion. You could not learn to play Mahjong from this book; it would only be useful for someone who wants to try a different variant and is already a good player in another variant.
Not enough detail is given to the very important Chinese Mahjong Competition (aka Mahjong Competition Rules [MCR]) and Japanese Riichi Mahjong variants as the brief overview misses important aspects of each variant that require more explanation.
For example, in MCR, scoring examples are needed to explain both the Fan and the scoring principles (like the Account Once Prinicple) which can be tricky in reality. Also there are official names for each of the fan and using non-standard names (like Young and Old Chows) is unhelpful. The scoring list is also missing the 6 point score of one melded kong and one concealed kong (it should be in the description of “Two Melded Kongs”).
Another issue is that the text formatting also vaires between chapters and could use some improvements to distinguish between sub-sections and text.
Overall, this is still a useful book and I hope the Third Edition will get more detail on each variant so that this becomes a serious reference book for Mahjong players.