This is a game that Aaron gave to Meals for her birthday. Neither of us had heard of it before, but it looked interesting, and boy are we pleased that we discovered it! Hours of entertainment! We spent quite a bit of time playing with our friends on our recent stay at a beach house in Phillip Island.
About the Game
Mhing is a card game and according to our mate Joe, it is quite similar to Mahjong (and also according to Joe, whilst Mhing is really good, Mahjong is better). Like Gin Rummy, the aim of the game is to build "sets". You are dealt 13 cards, and when you go "Mhing" (ie. complete your hand), you end up with 4 sets of 3 cards and 1 pair. The sets may either be "triplets" or "sequences". Only the player that goes Mhing in a particular round scores points. At the end of the round, you count the number of "credits" that the hand is worth, and convert that number into "points". Essentially, each additional credit doubles your number of points (not exactly, but it follows this trend). So, your aim is to make a higher scoring hand, but the risk is that you may get beaten to the post.
Play jumps around the table depending on who wants to claim the last card that was discarded - can be very frustrating when you turn is continually skipped!
It is a very easy game to learn to play, but working out how to the score a hand, as well as learning a strategy for building higher scoring hands, takes a while to master.
Players: 2 to 6
The ideal number to play with is probably 4 people, or perhaps 3. With more people, it becomes quite hard to put together monster hands, and obviously the game goes for a lot longer. It can be played by just two people (Meals and I had a great time with just the two of us - see below for the result), and you can put together some huge hands. In fact, the highest score has so far come from a two-player game (12 credits). However, play just passes back and forth, rather than jumping all around the table, and it is a little mundane.
Playing Time: 15 mins to 3 hours!
This is very variable, and really depends on how long you want to play for. One round of play is very quick, but if you were to play a full game (first to 500 points) with 6 people, you would need an entire evening.
Sample Game
Here is the first full game that Meals and I played last night (first to 500 points). It illustrates how the credits are converted to points, and the typical score for a hand.
| Jules | Meals | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rnd | Crds | Pts | Tot | Crds | Pts | Tot |
| 1 | 12 | 128 | 128 | |||
| 2 | 12 | 128 | 128 | |||
| 3 | 10 | 64 | 192 | |||
| 4 | 5 | 32 | 224 | |||
| 5 | 5 | 32 | 256 | |||
| 6 | 5 | 32 | 288 | |||
| 7 | 5 | 32 | 320 | |||
| 8 | 11 | 128 | 256 | |||
| 9 | 10 | 64 | 384 | |||
| 10 | 7 | 32 | 416 | |||
| 11 | 11 | 128 | 384 | |||
| 12 | 6 | 32 | 448 | |||
| 13 | 5 | 32 | 480 | |||
| 14 | 1 | 2 | 386 | |||
| 15 | 5 | 32 | 418 | |||
| 16 | 4 | 16 | 496 | |||
| 17 | 8 | 64 | 482 | |||
| 18 | 6 | 32 | 516 | |||
You can see that as the scores get closer to 500, it really becomes a mad dash to be the first to Mhing. When Meals reached 496 points (and hence only needed a two credit hand for victory), I knew I had to be the first to Mhing, even if I only got a low scoring hand out of it. Luckily I was dealt quite good hands for the last two rounds, and only needed a few cards to make a reasonable amount of points.
6 comments:
when making a Nothing Connects hand, can you have 4 sets of unconnected numbers and 2 or 3 different winds OR dragons?
(As opposed to Nothing Connects with all homours.)
Sorry Kathy, I'm not sure what you mean. I don't see how you could have 4 sets of unconnected numbers when there are only 3 suits, and at most you could have 3 cards from each suit, (eg. 1,4,7 or 3,6,9). The numbers must be at least three apart.
Does this answer your question? Or can you give a specific example? (ie. tell me exactly which cards you want to play)
What I don't get in my Dutch language rules (maybe also in english) is that is says you HAVE to have 4 sets of 3 and one pair in order to make MHING. Only the MHING hand counts for the scoring system. Yet you can have a "nothing connects" hand....but you cannot have a MHING while doing that can you??
We treat the "nothing connects" hand as a special case. I just checked over my english rules, and it seems to be the same as you describe. I think unless you treat the "nothing connects" hand as an exception (to the rule that you have to have 4 sets of 3 and one pair), then it doesn't work.
In conclusion, I suggest that you treat "nothing connects" as a valid mhing hand.
Hope that helps!
"Nothing connects" can only done at once at the end when you mhing (going out).
Since nothing connects, you won't be able to pick up discards to chow(sequence) nor pung(triplet). ONLY to mhing would you lay down all 14 cards including the 14th card drawn from the well or the discard.
xHh.
You're absolutely right, Henry.
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