Portable options .... Mahjong Cards?

[iandstanley]

Portability .... much as I like to play with tiles (I even keep a riichi set around at my brothers to save me carting around a set) I am looking at more portable options:


* PDA
* mobile phone
* DSLite
* Small tile set
* Mahjong cards

Well my pda long since died and I don\'t know of a good mahjong game that will run on anything other than the microsoft platform. I do not see the DS much as the kids keep it busy.

I\'ve tried to find a playable small set of mahjong for playing in confined areas (cafe/pubs, trains et al) but without much success. Most of the tile sets I have come across drop from the standard size down to 16mm or smaller and are impossible to shuffle without flipping many over.

And so my thoughts wander to mahjong cards (ideally Japanese cards) as a possible solution


I was wondering :unsure: ... anybody out there played with mahjong cards ...


The two I know about are ......

Hiros Japanese-mahjong.com http://japanese-mahjong.com/mjcards.html



and our own Reach Mahjongs store http://www.mahjongmart.com/shop/index.p ... cts_id=198




Card Styles
There appears to be two types of mahjong card faces:

1. the Mhing style which shows the kanji as a icon in the middle of the tile and a smaller kanji figure in the top left/bottom right corners allowing you to fan the cards close together. It does however, lose a little of the flavour with no depiction of a tile in sight.
Jenns selection follows this method and also has red-dotred-crakred-bam :lol:

2. a more unusual style of depicting the mahjong tile as per Hiros selection.

Packaging
Out of the two shown above:

1. Hiros selection of cards are packaged in a cardbox box with a plastic insert which I suspect will require a lot more care, whilst

2. Jenns selection comes in two plastic boxes which would protect the cards but the other component seem to be outside the box. I can easily leave the card holders behind if I want to stuff them in a pocket. Jenns cards have a yakitori markers and a wareme card (Anybody know what a wareme card is?)


Summary
I have an old cheap set of chinese cards from ebay (and once had the old Mhing set). They followed the overall style of Hiros above but were obviously very cheap ... in fact the cards were so packed tightly into a block that I had to bend them gently in the middle to separate them individually they went back flat but now won\'t go back in the box :angry:.
The old mhing cards were nice and thick but I prefer the narrower chinese/japanese style.


Has anybody played with these cards? How do they
take to use? ... some of the chinese mahjong cards fall apart very easily.


Comments and alternatives welcome ..... pros/cons etc


___________________

ps anybody know how to enter apostrophes ... when I enter I apostrophe ve I get backslash quote

[Barticle]

(Anybody know what a wareme card is?)

I´ve just got myself a new mahjong game on import (Mahjong Taikai IV for the PS3) and, despite no prior experience of reading kanji, I´m in the process of translating it. I´m making better progress than expected (i.e. some!) and I´ve learnt about several optional rules through this, including wareme.

Essentially the wareme rule states that the player whose section of the wall is broken at the start of each hand pays and receives double. If they happen to be east then the score effects are cummulative.

In my new game if you play the wareme rule then the player is indicated with a square blue marker, very similar to the red one used to denote the dealer.

I assume the card does the same job as the marker, although of course with cards you´d probably just have a draw pile rather than a wall.

anybody out there played with mahjong cards ...

Ah, I was wondering if you´d considered the card option. I´ve never tried them but it makes a lot of sense - very portable and little space required.

re: video games. You can get a number of mahjong games for the DS but you should of course make sure it´s proper mahjong rather than the imposter (the tile-matching game with mahjong tiles) and they´ll probably all be in Japanese.

The DS is region-free so it should run all imported games (except Chinese I think).

The following page shows some screenshoots of the DS version of Mahjong Taikai and lists some other titles in the side-bar. I know Mahjong Fight/Kakutou Club is popular here.

http://uk.gamespot.com/ds/puzzle/mahjongtaikai/

ps anybody know how to enter apostrophes ... when I enter I apostrophe ve I get backslash quote

I have the same problem. My solution (or workaround at least) is to copy a different apostrophe-type character either from the Character Map or from one of my earlier posts. :huh:

[Barticle]

I remembered that I´d taken a photo of the (blue) wareme marker in action!

I was going to ask about it on here but was able to work it out.

[Ruro]

The game looks nice :D but i won\'t trade off the janryumon for that of course :D also i think they shoud make a mini mahjong set with a table, that way the shuffling would be handled quite well and it could be quite fun using a mini auto table with affordable price :P The cards seem to be a good way for being portable but then again it could be a hard time shuffling all those and the game loses many of it\'s charm by that. I think you should just bring a set to where you go a little case is not that hard to carry around, we even played at a local pub with my friends and it was terribly fun :D Also random pub visitors gave us a look, so it was quite fun yelling RON and getting mistaken for a fool :D

[iandstanley]

I\'ve seen mini mahjong tables but they end up bulky with tiles that are tooooo small! I like the idea of an automatic min mahjong table though :)

[Barticle]

The game looks nice :D but i won\'t trade off the janryumon for that of course :D

I don´t have a PC at home but I wanted a game, like Janryumon, where you have a more realistic table display with the full wall, etc.

we even played at a local pub with my friends and it was terribly fun :D Also random pub visitors gave us a look, so it was quite fun yelling RON and getting mistaken for a fool :D

Cool - proud to be a public Reacher!

If it was an English pub there might be a man named Ron there - he might be unimpressed! Perhaps he´d be there with his friends Sue and Moe! :laugh:

And Richie!

[Zi Rong Low]

I have a set of Mhing cards which I bought a while ago. Now that I have a mahjong set, I don\'t use it anymore. In fact I only used it around 5 or 6 times.

To put it simply, I\'ll state what I felt to be the pros and cons:

Pros:
- much lighter and compact than a regular mahjong set
- much cheaper as well, I got mine second hand for around
$5 but I think you can buy new ones from Amazon for less than $20
- basic gameplay is extremely similar, if not the same as Mahjong
- contains the \"default\" 136 cards and 8 flower cards so you\'re able to play most Chinese mahjong variants. Also comes with 6 Wild/Joker cards which can be anything. If there were 2 more Wild/Joker cards, you\'d be able to play American (NMJL) style too, although I imagine you\'d be repulsed by that!
- has the normal number displayed on the top left and bottom right corner of the suit cards, and ENSW for the winds
- would be excellent to try for somebody who isn\'t sure whether he really likes mahjong, so if he doesn\'t like the gameplay of Mhing, an actual (and more expensive) mahjong set won\'t have to be purchased.

Cons:
- Cards definitely don\'t feel and look as nice as actual tiles
- I find the cards to have kinda ugly designs. It still uses the suits of bamboo/dots/craks, but the arrangement of the bamboo and dots is just yuck. However I guess that people who haven\'t played with an actual mahjong set wouldn\'t have noticed
- It gets annoying having to hold 13 cards in your hand after a while. I guess you could buy a card holder or one of those wooden racks which some people use in Canasta
- If you were to play so all discards are neatly visible like in Japanese rules, then it\'ll start taking up a lot of space
- You can\'t do that cool tile shuffling after the end of each hand!!!

[iandstanley]

Thanks all

I picked up the ones from jenns shop ... thay are quite small, somewhat thinner than others I\'ve seen but they do come in study plastic boxes. They also have card holders that stand up by themselves.

One of the other benefits is that at least they can be shuffled well in confined space. The tiny chinese MJ sets just roll like dice.

Maybe I\'ll take a couple of shots and post them on this thread

[Barticle]

Digging up an old thread...

I just got a set of mahjong playing cards off eBay UK. They're the same size as poker cards but obviously the stack is a little taller! (it has the standard 144 Chinese tiles including four flowers and four seasons) The markings aren't especially attractive but they're functional. There are no Arabic numerals so the designs are cleaner but no good for learners. I was about to bin the bubblewrap packaging but luckily noticed they'd sent me two dice separately too - poor quality (and why is the 4 red on only one of them?) but better than nothing. The deck has no scoring tokens or round-wind indicator though so you'd need to improvise there.

I got the deck new from seller "dealfromshanghai" for four quid with free shipping from Shanghai - only took about a week to arrive. Another Shanghai seller currently has the same decks on eBay US for $10 with free shipping.

mjcards.jpg (13.7 KiB) Viewed 20641 times

In related news I also recently grabbed a cheap Mhing set from a UK charity shop on eBay. These seem to be plentiful on the auction site.

[zzo38]

ps anybody know how to enter apostrophes ... when I enter I apostrophe ve I get backslash quote

The problem is that PHP is misconfigured.

[Barticle]

This issue was resolved when we transferred to the new forums; certainly I haven't experienced it for years.

[Referee]

If it was an English pub there might be a man named Ron there - he might be unimpressed! Perhaps he´d be there with his friends Sue and Moe! :laugh:

And Richie!

And Dora, too. (Mangan!)

[or2az]

Just for clarification, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the original question about apostrophes was asked 5 years ago in the first post in this thread by someone whom I think has posted only once since Sept of 2009 and that post was 3 years ago.
The date was probably overlooked when it was brought up again. (It was also answered 2 days later in the 2nd post)

[Barticle]

Yes, Ian is one of many users who have come and gone over the years... To be fair, I only offered workarounds in my original reply rather than highlighting the cause.

Ref - I don't know how well known he is worldwide but there's a comedy actor here in the UK called Stephen Mangan.