Jeremy Parish
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Famiconversations Episode 5: The Mahjong Primer
🕑 Added 2021-06-26 19:28:41 +0000 UTCA little something different this month for the Famiconversations podcast. I've covered a bunch of mahjong titles in my videos over the years, and there a ton clustered at the beginning of the Japanese console wave. While my videos have amounted to me pointing out some technical details of the software and shrugging in defeat at not really understanding the mechanics of mahjong, for this podcast I decided it's time to change that. I've enlisted the help of Travis, a competitive mahjong player, to explain just what mahjong is about and help provide a better sense of how Mah-Jong is different from Mahjong and from Home Mahjong and 4 Nin Uchi Mahjong and Sannin Mahjong. In short, this episode is about object lessons, with Travis explaining the rules to me as I sample these games via Zoom.
It might be a little hard to follow some of this conversation in audio-only form, which is why I've captured the video element of our chat! You can view that right here if you prefer.
Enjoy this very educational episode, and be sure to check out Travis' site, where he is doing his best to chronicle every mahjong game he can get his hands on.
Also, as a quick aside, I'm afraid there won't be a PDF download this month. I apologize for the lapse! Life has been extremely chaotic for me over the past month, and I haven't had time for my Instagram uploads—it's been enough of a struggle just to hit my weekly video production milestones and record Retronauts. I'll be getting back into that routine next week, however, and PDFs will follow once again (and, somewhere down the road, a big beautiful printed coffee table book version). I'm also hard at work on NES Works 1987 now, and I'm confident that it will be an even bigger and better publication than Super NES Works 1991. I'm really going the extra mile with this one, and I hope to have it complete and ready to send to press this fall.
Comments
Colbin Erdahl
I followed the same path as Diamond. I also have to admit, I didn’t expect to get anything out of this, given that I neither read nor speak any Japanese (or Chinese). After watching (and listening to Travis), I think I finally grok Mahjong a bit, though. When he was talking about creating combinations within your hand, I realized it reminds me a lot of a game my grandma taught me, which is in fact called Gin Rummy (I’m guessing this is Jeremy’s favorite rummy). I don’t know if others have experience, but Gin Rummy is played with a standard 52-card deck, you are dealt 10 cards, then you draw/discard 1 card each round until you have some combination of sets and runs in your hand. There is no set combination, you can have several different sets, or one long run if you can pull it off, which is where I saw the resemblance to Mahjong. Obviously Mahjong’s tile “deck” is more complex than just the 4 suits, and there seem to be additional layers of complexity in the rules, but I wonder if Travis would agree that Gin Rummy is similar to a very stripped down version of Mahjong. Culturally, I’m curious as to the best analog of Mahjong that exists in the West. Given my limited knowledge, I’m wondering if it is more like Bridge (my grandparents also had a standing Bridge game where they would travel to the house of a different couple each week), or Poker (here I’m thinking of the trope of a smoky basement where middle-aged men secretly gamble their paycheck away). Perhaps Mahjong lies culturally between Bridge and Poker, or perhaps it could even fulfill both roles at different times. For the first time ever, I’m interested! And that is what Jeremy’s podcast has done for me today.
Diamond Feit
Tried to listen to it audio-only, was fascinated, so I stopped so I could watch the video and actually learn something.
