I was on holiday last week with my in-laws. I tried Mhing as it looked accessible and simple. We played with six, which was a mistake as it slowed the game down.
Mhing was designed in 1985 and is basically streamlined Mahjong played with cards. In turn, you draw a card and discard a card, until one person gets four melds (sets) of three and one pair and wins the hand. Melds can be three of a kind or a run of three in the same suit. You can use another’s discard, so long as you use it to play a meld to the table immediately. Only the winner of the hand scores. You get points for the combinations of cards in your hand and these combinations are unintuitive and confusingly stated.
I have a few problems with Mhing:
- Scoring is too complex for first-time casual players.
- The game relies on competency. If everyone is content to score their hands as soon as possible, they score very few points and the game crawls.
- It’s too easy to keep scoring terrible hands and still do better than those trying to make good hands. My mother-in-law was barely paying attention but kept on scoring poor hands and almost won.
In the words of my step-father-in-law:
You could leave this game in an old peoples’ home and they could play it endlessly and love it.
I can see the appeal of Mhing, but I will never play it when there are so many other more elegant, modern card games available. At least it saved me the expense of buying a Mahjong set.
4/10
