Mahjong Guide

My favorite thing about American mahjong isn’t the strategy. It’s the fact that a seventy-eight-year-old and a thirteen-year-old can sit at the same table and both be genuinely interested. Not one of them politely humoring the other. Both of them in it. That’s rarer than it sounds. Most family games split by age. Board games…

You can learn the rules of American mahjong in an afternoon. The card, the Charleston, the jokers — none of it is that hard once someone walks you through it. But there’s a second layer that nobody prints on the rule sheet, and it’s the part that decides whether people actually want to play with…