Last week I decided that I was going to learn how to play real Mahjong - not that solitaire tile matching game you're probably used too, but the real deal.
Why? Well, much like how LOST got me interested in learning how to play Backgammon, I stumbled onto an Anime series (Saki) that was about Mahjong and was rather technical about scoring and other aspects of the game. So instead of just walking away from the series because I didn't understand what was going on, I decided that I should just learn how to play the game.
I found one, FunTown Mahjong, on XBox Live Arcade and downloaded it. The scoring system boggles the mind, and while looking it up on Wikipedia I found that there are multiple variations of Mahjong; each with it's own rule variations and scoring methods.
It turns out that the XBox game I bought uses the Taiwanese variation which uses 16 tiles, while most other variations only use 13. I figured there was something different after I went back to the Anime series and noticed they were using different terms and scoring, but now I know. So now I've found a site [GameDesign.jp] that uses the Japanese variation and have been trying to learn that as well. If I thought the Taiwanese variation was mind bending, it was nothing compared to the Japanese variation...
Still it takes a lot of practice to learn a new game, and I'm up to the challange. I just with there was a club around here that could teach me more...
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