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by MarkVanDiggelen

In today's hustle and bustle their is a constant race in trying to take all of the possible technologies out there and use them to produce the most amazing games. The goal is to offer the most intriguing gameplay, amazing graphics and interesting plots to keep players coming back for more. If you take this in mind you must say that it really says a lot about those games that have never required any enhancements over hundreds of years. These are games like Mahjong that have had a huge following for over 2500 years and is still popular.

The traditional Chinese game of mahjong is played by four players each seated at the position of East, South, West and North. In gameplay, the person at the East position gets first turn as the banker/dealer. If he wins the hand, he continues this role. The benefits of being the banker/dealer are to have extra chances of scoring higher on a hand.

The traditional Chinese game is played with a mahjong set of 144 tiles - 36 tiles each in the suit of bamboo, characters and circles along with 12 dragon tiles and 16 wind tiles. In addition, there are 8 flower tiles but these are not played in the actual game but give the players extra points during the distribution and drawing of the tiles.

The game of mahjong starts when each player is distributed 13 tiles. The object of the game is to create 4 melds of three whether it is by triplets (pung) or a series (chow) by self-draw or by tile discards from other players. In addition to the 4 melds, the winning hand needs an additional pair for the "eyes". Therefore, a winning hand is composed of 14 tiles in total.

Extra points are given to the winning hand if it has all pungs, all chows, all in the same suit, or if triplets were made from the dragon tiles, or if the winner was able to pung his own directional wind tiles.

The game will definitely confuse you at first, but as soon as you have the tile set in front of you and play a few games you will get the hang of it easily. For players who also play gin rummy it is just so much easier to play the game as many of the same principles apply.

The game of mahjong takes is fairly easy to learn, but takes a very long time to master. If you play a lot you will figure out the little subtleties of the game and constantly improve. You will also get better at playing your opponents and calculation odds

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You can play mahjong solitaire a popular variation of the game on skillpod.com. There are loads of other online games on there as well.