About

Why EASTA exists

The game most Americans call Mah Jongg is not the game most of the world calls mahjong. That gap is where all the confusion lives.

Two games, one name

Mahjong left China in the 1920s and landed in the United States, where it was promptly rewritten. American players dropped whole categories of tiles, added jokers, standardised on a hand card that is reissued every single year, and built a game that a player from Shanghai would not recognise.

Both games are worth playing. Almost all of the writing about them treats them as one thing, which is why a beginner searching for rules gets three contradictory answers before lunch.

What we are doing about it

We are writing the reference we could not find: what the tiles are, how many of them there are and why the number keeps changing, how the card works, and what actually happens at a table. Plainly, and in one place.

Alongside that we are building a set of our own. Not a rebadged import — we are specifying the tiles, the weight, the feel of the thing, and we would rather take the time than ship something we would not play with.