#Shanghai mahjong dos windows#

You need to keep alert in case you can pick up a discard, and to guess what sets other players might be trying to compete. To start with, a single hand of Mahjong is not a quick diversion while you're waiting for a friend on IRC to return to the keyboard. Now that I think of them, these disadvantages may explain why true Mahjong has never really caught on as a computer game. In general, Kajongg's game-play is reasonable, but Mahjong does have several disadvantages that neither Kajongg or any other implementation can do much to overcome. However, no matter which one you choose, probably you will want to play Kajongg full-screen, since some of the tiles can be hard to read in a smaller window.

Since KDE has long had a tile-matching game, four designs are available. There is even an option for exchanging comments with other players, although obviously that has no purpose in a local game against the computer. The possible moves that you can make at any time are displayed on buttons down the right side of the screen. Similarly, in theory you could play Kajongg on a game server, but for now the only option is for a local game in which the computer plays three players.Īside from an incongruous default Egyptian-themed wallpaper (which I quickly changed to a Chinese painting), Kajongg closely reproduces a real life game of Mahjong, with players' tiles arranged in a square and discards placed randomly in the middle. Currently, Kajongg offers only Classical Chinese scoring rules, although it will also allow different rule sets to be added if anybody ever writes them. Played for centuries around the world, Mahjong has a number of variations, most of them involving the exact number of tiles and the sets that players can make. The result is a game that involves luck but also a strategic awareness of which tiles have been played, a combination that makes the game ideal for gambling. When all a player's tiles are in a set, the player wins. The goal is to collect sets of tiles, usually three or four of a kind, but also rarer, more complicated sets. However, the Mahjong that Kajongg offers is a game for four players that resembles gin rummy, with tiles in place of cards. You can find versions of the tile-matching game in GNOME as mahjongg and in KDE as kmahjongg.

That is a game sometimes called Shanghai that uses Mahjong tiles, but has more in common with solitaire or patience than true Mahjong. I am not talking, you understand, about the matching game that masquerades as Mahjong. Nor did I ever find a Mahjong game that ran natively in GNU/Linux - not, that is, until KDE released Kajongg a couple of versions ago.

#Shanghai mahjong dos windows#

Years ago, I found a monochrome shareware game for DOS, and later I found a Windows game, but both were soon rendered unusable by developments in hardware and software. Not a decent Mahjong game, but any at all. For as long as I've owned a computer, I've been looking for Mahjong game.