My mom taught me how to play.

She told me Ma John would teach me important life skills or this scene from the Joy Luck Club for 30 years, thes women feasted, forgot past wrongs, laughed and played, lost in one and told the best stories.

They're all playing Mah Jong, a Chinese tile game that's over 100 years old.

It's fast paced, very competitive and sometimes involves money.

The goal is to create matching sets of tiles on Because there are 144 tiles, there are many, many variations on the rules.

There's even in American version, but today will teach you a basic version called Competition Module, which is used in tournaments all around the world.

Here's what you'll need four chairs, a table for people and ah mah jong set.

At first glance, the tiles might look daunting, but once you see them, as suits becomes much simpler.

There are three suits, bamboo dots and characters.

Each suit contains four sets of tiles, numbered 1 to 9.

Then there are 16 wind tiles in 12 dragon tiles.

There are also ate bonus times, four flowers in four seasons.

If you're playing with points or money, drawing them means more points or more money.

Throughout the game, people will keep throwing out and picking up tiles to create sets.

There are three types of sets you can make.

Punk is a set of three identical tiles.

Gang is a set of four identical tiles.

Sure is a sequence of three tiles of the same suit.

Your goal is to create four sets of three and a pair.

All right, that's all you need to know.

For now, let's play first.

Each player rolls the dice.

The person who rolls the biggest number becomes the dealer, shuffle the tiles and create four walls.

This'll becomes the deck from where everyone draws tiles.

Each player gets 13 tiles, but the dealer gets 14 and starts the game by throwing one out thin.

The next player on the dealer's right takes one from the draw pile on has to pick one out to throw out.

You could keep playing the game this way, but it will get pretty boring until you hear this.

So, uh, who come?

So what do these mean?

Remember those sets we were talking about earlier?

You can make those sets by stealing tiles from the table.

Say you have two of these.

You notice another player throwing out the exact same one.

You can take it and shout punk on Reveal the triple.

Keep them, though, because you'll need them later to win.

But you can on Li Peng as soon as someone throws out the tile and you have to shout, by the way, so don't zone out.

Let's say you have these two tiles and you want to make a sequence.

You can only steal that tile that completes it.

If the player on your left throws it out, that's called a chief.

Set the triple aside and then throw out a title.

And what if you're lucky enough to have three of the exact same tiles?

If someone throws out, the fourth one can make a complete set at home.

Come put that aside because it's for bonus points.

Later, you can then take one tile.

But let's say two people shout punk and at the same time who gets it?

It goes to the punk, but how do you win?

You need to have four sets of three, including the triples you've revealed and a pair of identical tiles, which means there are two ways to win.

You can either steal the last tile you need from someone who throws it out, pull up Ganey or draw from the deck that's called a symbol small.

Here are some possible winning combinations.

If you get really into it, you'll learn that some combinations give you more points than others because they're harder to make.

And now you know why games of Machon can get so laughed.

Here's a bit of history about the game.

Three Actual origins of macho are unclear.

Ah, popular legend says that Confucius invented the game inspired by his love of birds.

But actual records of Mah Jang Onley date back about 150 years to the 18 seventies.

Before Ma John, there were similar card games like pizza pie, which dates back to the Tang Dynasty.

It was played with 32 cards made of ivory or wood.

As time passed, the number of cards increased in the game became more complicated.

By the late 18 hundreds, the cards were replaced with tiles.

One popular story attributes the reason toe.

A sailor who had his cards blown away while playing the game on a ship.

Regardless of how much young actually came to be.

The new game became a craze in China, and it's still considered the national pastime.