Meet the tiles

Hello. I'm Miss Flower. Before we do anything else today, let me tell you about the first time I played mahjong. January 2012. Taipei. I'd just come out of a dumpling place on Yongkang Street. The one on the corner, the one with the bamboo steamers stacked to the ceiling and the two old men at the counter who've been pleating soup dumplings by hand for forty years. Two in the afternoon, already too late for lunch, too early for anything else, and the perfect time to be walking around Taipei in January, because the winter sun does that low thing where everything turns gold, and you can't see your own breath but your hands feel it. Across the street, under a green awning. Four women at a plastic table. Tiles everywhere. They were laughing, and not the polite laugh you do with strangers. The real one. The shoulders-going one. One of them looks up, sees me standing there with my hands in my coat pockets, and just waves me over. Nothing said. I didn't speak Mandarin. She didn't speak a word of English. She pulled a fifth chair out, pushed a paper cup of tea across the table at me, and started handing me tiles. I had no idea what I was doing. None. I still don't know what they called the tiles that afternoon in Mandarin. Whatever the word was, I never caught it. I just watched them. For maybe an hour. And by the end of that hour, I understood enough to sit down at a table with four other humans and hold my own. That's what I'm going to do for you today. Not four hundred years of history. Not a textbook. The thing that happens when you pay attention at a table for an hour. Alright. Look down at your hand. Let's start.

These are bamboos. Green sticks, numbered one to nine, four copies each. That's thirty-six bamboos in the whole deck. Everyone calls them boos, bams, or just sticks. But look at this one, the 1-bamboo. That's a bird, not a stick. Every player at every table I've ever played at calls it the birdie.

These are cracks. Red Chinese character on top, number on the bottom. Same maths as the bamboos. One to nine, four copies each, thirty-six in total. People call them cracks, wan, or characters. The red character on top is the giveaway. You can't miss it.

Circles. Also called dots, balls, coins, or wheels. Take your pick. Same pattern: one to nine, four copies each, thirty-six in total. Coloured dots arranged in the shape of the number itself. And that's your three suits done.

Four directions: east, south, west, north. Four copies each, sixteen winds total. Chinese character on top, English letter below. These get important later. Where you sit at the table decides which wind is yours. For now, just learn what they look like.

Three dragons. Four copies each, twelve in total. Red is zhong. That means "centre" in Chinese. Green is fa. Prosperity. And the white one? It's called soap. Look at it. It literally looks like a bar of soap. Every dragon pong scores a bonus, no exceptions. Remember these. These are your money tiles.

These eight are flowers. Four red, four blue, numbered one to four. They break all the normal rules. They don't fit into sets at all. The moment you pick one up, it flips out of your hand on its own and you draw a replacement from the back of the wall. Each flower you end up with earns you a bonus point. You don't do anything with them. They just sit there and earn. We'll come back to flowers properly in Class 7.

Here's your job every round. Make five groups of three tiles, plus one pair. Five and one. Seventeen tiles in your hand when you win. Three of the same tile is a pong. Three in a row, same suit, is a sheung. Four of the same is a kong. We'll get to that later. And two of the same is a pair. Five sets, one pair. That's the whole game.

Okay. Let me play a quick round for you. You don't have to touch anything. Just watch. Everything I've just taught you is about to show up in real motion.

That's class one. You know the tiles. You know what a winning hand looks like. You haven't moved one yourself yet. That's class two. Come back whenever you're ready. This class stays open forever. Replay it any time you want.