Mhing
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
[…] played Mhing the other day. It’s basically Mahjong with cards. Not terrible. http://cheyne.net/blog/2009/08/mhing/ a few seconds ago from […]
Iain Cheyne (icheyne) 's status on Saturday, 29-Aug-09 15:19:42 UTC - Identi.ca
29 Aug 09 at 15:19
Not that I’m forcing you to like Mhing, but…
1. Yes, even the streamlined scoring can be a bit complex. If I played mahjong or Mhing with first-timers, I wouldn’t mind the scoring at all, instead getting them focused on making valid winning hands. Count the scores, sure, but don’t make it a big deal. Maybe give them a few pointers, like “single suit hands are good” and “similar sequences are good”. But that’s pretty much enough.
2. How come? Maybe if you’re playing to a high total, but I never do that – we’ve always played exactly as many hands as we feel like. Another option is to play a set number of hands. Low hands = not a problem.
3. Yes, this can be somewhat frustrating for those who get their pleasure mainly out of making good hands. However, with eight wild cards making decent hands isn’t that hard and once the players grok the rules, it’s possible to set a minimum hand value limit. I generally don’t like that sort of rules, though, as they feel somewhat artificial. Official Chinese rules have really high minimum hand value, it’s very hard for beginners.
In any case, I’d never ever play mahjong with six, unless playing so that two players sit out of each hand. It’s four players max. I think that’ll also make your problem number three somewhat smaller.
I wouldn’t mind getting some mahjong action myself, we just returned from a birthday party where we gave a nice bone and bamboo mahjong set. Too bad we didn’t have time to play… But it’s one of those games that are much better with folks who can play, playing with newbies is so slow that it really taxes my patience, I’d like to play really fast. It’s better that way. Choosing the tile to discard isn’t usually a big decision, it shouldn’t take many seconds…
Mikko Saari
29 Aug 09 at 17:24
Oh, by the way – the login worked perfectly now.
Mikko Saari
29 Aug 09 at 17:29
All good points Mikko. I should have been less ambitious and tried with fewer players and been less focused on scoring. It’s interesting that you play more by time than to a score. Mhing stipulates a 500 score. We played for 2.5 hours and only got to 16!
Ultimately it’s not my kind of game, but I could see it being fun in some circumstances. Playing with nice Mahjong tiles and with a bunch of familiar players would be much more fun.
Thanks for testing the login.
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Iain Cheyne
29 Aug 09 at 17:42
I think Mhing is good quality fun with 2 players. With two it’s fast, you don’t have weird turn-skipping, and you can play several hands to sensible targets and come to grips with the game quickly. The scoring is quirky, but it’s not that bad and when you can play a hand in 10-15 minutes it’s not to hard to grapple with. The risk-reward calculus is neat, when do you go out fast and when do you try for the long-shot monster hand? Usually it’s best to go out fast, but not always.
But, with more than two players, it does degrade pretty fast.
Chris
30 Aug 09 at 01:55
You’re right Chris. Half way through our game, two players dropped out and it improved a lot.
Iain
30 Aug 09 at 07:16