Almost a meme

[watervole]

People have been posting about the five things that give them exhilarating moments.

Here's my one for today. I'm just back from leaping up down and doing a small dance around the lounge floor and grinning all over my face and shouting 'yes!'.

exalted_mugwump, waveney and I have been playing a game of mah-jong over the last few days. (We have to take a break every few hands or my shoulder flares up)

I'd been losing steadily, not a single mah-jongg hand for the entire game and was a thousand points down. I was getting desperate. I got a hand that was almost half characters and decided to go for broke. I nursed it, collected more, resisted the temptation to go for chows (even when Richard started laying down a number of doubles) turned it into potential pungs, discarded a possible chow in circles and waited.

Got it! All characters and all pungs. Four doubles! From being a thousand points down, I'm now 400 points up and I'm a very happy bunny.

Please visualise Xander doing the Scooby dance.

Comments

[peaceful-fox.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's so cool! I've never played mah-jongg, and I would like to learn how. Now that I think about it, I think there's a mah-jongg set around here somewhere. :::rummage:::

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Excellent game. I first fell in love with Richard while playing mah-jong 27 and a half years ago.

[waveney.livejournal.com]

She was lucky, I was only one tile away from an even better Mar-jong which was 4 tiles away in the wall. She would have lost another 1600 points and been wiped out... Note to Vato, Mar-jong is a game for 4 players (it plays with 3 but not as good).

[peaceful-fox.livejournal.com]

Okay - I'm glad to know that it's for 4 people. I am interested to try it at some point! :-) How about for two people, each with multiple personalities? ;-)

[kevinrtaylor.livejournal.com]

It's so long since I played I've forgotten the difference between pungs, kongs and chows. It would be nice to play again.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I tried to learn mah-jongg once and got terribly confused. I am not one of life's natural gameplayers, me... :/

[kerravonsen]

Go you! Isn't it a thrill when one gets a good hand?

I know of about three different major variations of Mah-jong; sounds like you're playing what we would call "Chinese", wheras when I was a kid we'd play many games of what we called "Western" (which has lots of special hands and mandates that one is required to have a pure suit and a maximum of one chow). The two games are quite different in style. Then there's the "South Pacific" version, which is even more complicated than "Western".

And then of course there are the different methods of scoring...