Mah-jongg madness

Dot, bam, crak! For the devotees at this Brookline salon, it's all about the tiles.

Dianne Mueller, who teaches the game, takes part in a mah-jongg session at the College Club in the Back Bay. (Globe Staff Photo / Pat Greenhouse)

It's a Monday evening and the din of chatter, laughter, and the clack of tiles fills the second floor of Dianne Mueller's Brookline home. As they slap the tiles down, the players call out their names.

"Six dot."

"Nine bam."

"Three crak."

"Flower."

"Two bam."

"Seven crak."

Just as she does every week at this time, Mueller flits around the eight women seated at two card tables, stealing a peek at their tiles and leaning over their shoulders occasionally to whisper tips on strategy.

"You weren't focused on your card," she admonishes one player.

This is Mueller's self-styled mah-jongg salon. The 57-year-old with long, raven ringlets teaches her students how to win with the colorful, domino-sized tiles before them.

Between periodic instructions on how to play their hands in this game that some liken to gin rummy, Mueller refills the players' glasses of water and the dishes of white-cheddar popcorn and peanut-butter-filled pretzels they snack on. Everyone takes turns drawing a tile from the "wall" in the middle and flicking one back scattershot, causing the tiles to click together.

Mueller's pet chihuahua, The Dude, struts about, begging for attention.

The students, ranging in age from their 40s to 60s, are playing an American version of the traditionally Chinese mah-jongg. The Westernized game is said to have appeared on US shores in the 1920s and has since grown into a phenomenon offering hundreds of thousands of players nationally a social outlet - and, for many, a sense of sorority.

The atmosphere in Mueller's salon is more friendly than competitive, with conversation topics ranging from Hillary Clinton's failed presidential bid to the players' personal lives.

"It is a card game," said Elizabeth Curado, picking up a tile, "if women ran poker night. . . . I've never played another game and got sidetracked on somebody's divorce story before."

The players here are trying to build winning hands, as designated each year by the National Mah Jongg League. Started predominantly by women of Jewish descent in 1937, the league now boasts over 300,000 members across the country. In Massachusetts about 6,000 players are registered with the organization.

Although the Western version of mah-jongg can be traced to an American businessman who worked in Shanghai - he created the simpler rules - it was mainly Jewish women in Brooklyn who popularized the game here in the 1920s and '30s, says Tom Sloper, author of "The Red Dragon and the West Wind," a book about mah-jongg published last year.

"The '20s were a decade of fads," says Sloper. "Women were wearing flapper dresses, people were dancing the Charleston. Mah-jongg fit in. There was a lot of bonding over this game; you forget your troubles."

Ruth Unger, 27-year president of the not-for-profit NMJL, based in New York, says the league traces its history to a Manhattan resident named Viola Cecil, who in the 1930s put an ad in the newspaper encouraging American mah-jongg players to meet. A core group of about 30 women formed. They decided to regulate the game and recruited others by selling annual cards listing the group's prescribed set of winning hands each year. "They came up with this conception of standardizing the game and giving the proceeds to charity," says Unger, who has been playing for over six decades.

The nonprofit group still donates much of its income to charities, says Unger, and its members have opportunities to form life-lasting bonds.

"We have a cruise in December where we have a minimum of 250 people playing, and strangers become friends," Unger says. "They come back year after year. There is just magic in the tiles, I say."

Mueller, a self-proclaimed savant of the game who has also taught it at the College Club on Comm. Ave. and the Boston Center for Adult Education, is Jewish, but said most of the people she plays with in Boston are not. She invites beginners to visit her duplex each week for a three-hour supervised session costing $7. Students must also purchase the national league's rules and the hands card that lists the year's winning combinations.

Each mah-jongg set has 152 tiles (as opposed to the Chinese version, which has 144), and game play starts after "washing the tiles," or shuffling them face down in the center of the table, creating a sound comparable to hail clattering on pavement. In succession, each player draws 13 tiles and the dealer gets one extra to discard when kicking off game play. Next comes the "Charleston," an orchestrated exchange of tiles between players.

"We have a lot of fun with the slang," Mueller says.

When discarding, a player must say the name of the tile aloud and then any other player can immediately call the tile to pick it up for their own hand.

"A lot of the skill is taking the hand you are dealt, being aware of what's discarded, and passing the tiles and getting what you need while play is going," Mueller says. "I call it a mental ballet - a dance around this card to switch and to have the ability to play defensively, to know the look on the players' faces, making people believe you're not looking for one thing when you really are."

A player wins by making a "mah-jongg" - 14 tiles forming one of the year's more than 50 fixed combinations of runs, sequences, and pairings, as prescribed by the league.

Money is involved, but it's hardly high stakes - the bets are also prescribed by the league. In American mah-jongg, the most coveted hand is worth 75 cents, the least valuable a quarter. Play continues for a predetermined amount of time and the victor is the one with the most spoils.

"How do you know what you win? You go home and count your money," says Hildreth Curran, who's been coming to Mueller's salon since February.

"We were normal people and then all of a sudden we spend hours on eBay looking at mah-jongg sets," says Curran, who lives in Lynn and works at a Boston hospital. "We're possessed. I now own three mah-jongg sets: one for work, one for home, and one for, uh . . . " She can't think of a reason for the third.

Some players have mah-jongg sets passed down through generations.

"Of course I could buy a new set, and new sets are flashy and nice," says Susan Hartz, who helped teach Mueller to play. "But mah-jongg's a very tactile game - there is something about playing with the set that my mother played with her friends and aunts. It's just a very good feeling."

The 65-year-old Boston resident has been playing for over half a century. "We used to go to the beach for the summer," Hartz says. "My mother and her friends would play mah-jongg. My friends and I decided we'd learn how to play." Her set is made from Bakelite, a pallid, yellow polymer made before World War II.

Mueller brought her daughter, Rikki, when she went to Atlantic City at the end of May to attend a four-day tournament sponsored by the American Mah-jongg Association at the Trump Taj Mahal.

"Loved it," Mueller says.

While the older women played their own hands at the tournament, Rikki, 16, acted as the hands for a quadriplegic woman from Brooklyn who usually plays online via computer.

Back in Boston, says Mueller, games at players' homes can last up to 10 hours.

"I coined a phrase: You have to become one with the card," she says. "It's very Zen."