Pung Chow is made to withstand the climatic conditions which soon destroy the article imported under the name of Mah-Jongg and the other corruptions of Mah-Diao, and it is the true and original Chinese game translated by the addition of numerals just enough to be readily understood and not enough to spoil the artistry of the tiles. The addition of numerals has been overdone in the marking of many of the cheaper imported sets, and give the appearance of having had numerals sprinkled on them regardless of where they may land and permitted to stay.
The fundamentals of this game are simple and require only practice to master. The science of Pung Chow must in the greater part be studied out by the individual player and one may spend the rest of his life in attaining to past mastery in its thousand-fold intricacies.
SUMMARY OF THE GAME
Before going thoroughly into the details of the playing of the game, it is better to give a general view of the play and its object.
Pung Chow is played by thoroughly shuffling all of the tiles face down in the middle of the table, and forming them in a double-tiered, hollow square, called the wall. This wall is then broken at some point determined by the dice and each player draws an original hand of 13 tiles. This leaves about two-thirds of the wall intact, and the rest of the play is devoted to drawing and discarding from this remainder of the wall; each player improving and matching his own individual hand until having arranged it into four sets and a pair, some player wins. A set is three of a kind, four of a kind or three in a sequence. Every set has a scoring value, and the players add their scores and settle after every hand. A player may win with a score as low as 22 points or scores may run to 380,928 points. These possibilities will unfold as the following pages on the details of the play are read.
Illustration No. 1.
The thirty-four different tiles and the counters