Mahjong

Mahjong sets from Jaques are of the very highest quality in craftsmanship, where each Mahjong tile is handmade from the finest materials.

Jaques Mahjong games are created using beautiful tiles and all Mahjong sets come complete with a full instruction booklet made suitable for all levels of player, from complete beginners to experts, so everyone can play the game of Mahjong.

Jaques luxury Mahjong game is presented in beautiful Mahogany cabinets set with solid brass fittings and include hand-engraved tiles and ebonized tile racks. Sets come complete with score sticks, wind discs and a copy of Jaques original rules.

We have been making quality games and looking after our customers for over 200 years, so you can buy Mahjong from Jaques with confidence.

Mahjong is a game for four players that originated in China around 500 BC. Today it is played around the world both in Western and Eastern cultures. In China today the game is so ingrained within Chinese culture that major films, books and arcade games feature scenes in what is now referred to as the Mahjong sub-genre.

It is a game of skill, strategy and calculation but also involves an element of luck depending on the variation played. The object of the game is to build complete suits or 'melds' with either 13 or 16 tiles. The first person to achieve this is the winner.

In 1895, Stewart Culin, an American anthropologist, wrote a paper in which Mahjong was mentioned. This is the first known written account of Mahjong in any language other than Chinese. Shortly after, Jaques imported the first Mahjong sets for sale in the UK.

By 1910, there were written accounts in many languages, including French and Japanese. In 1920, Abercrombie & Fitch became the first American brand to introduce the game. It became a success in New York and the owner of the company, Ezra Fitch, sent emissaries to Chinese villages to buy every set of Mahjong they could find. Abercrombie & Fitch sold a total of 12,000 sets.

American Mahjong, mainly played by Jewish women during the 1920s in America, grew from this populaity. By the 1930s many revisions of the rules developed that were substantially different from Babcock's classical version.

Mahjong is not the first re-appearance of the Chinese game in the western world. It was also introduced by W H Wilkinson of HBM Consular Service and published in card form by Messrs. Goodall of London, prior to 1895, under the name of Khanhoo. This card game does not seem to have made any impression, the success of Mahjong resting in no small part upon the elegance of its mechanism as embodied in the domino-like pieces.