The Quintuple Arcana

Fig. 1  The Quintuple Arcana

Given my lifelong fascination with games, it should come as no surprise that I've made up a number of games of my own. I've got one game, in fact, that I've been working on for over 30 years, and I'm not finished with it yet.

It's called the Quintuple Arcana— in my own Hermetic language, Mna Jondir-Pantho Zinisa. The Quintuple Arcana is one of the chief board games played by my Hermetic people, though the game was originally created by an alien race called the Esloniki, in the science-fictional future history I was writing back in my teens. I've got to be careful here— in my mind, much of the terminology for the game is in Hermetic. Will try to render it into English as I go.

The Quintuple Arcana is a game for two players, played with tiles which are entered and moved around on the board. Each player tries to move so as to form certain melds, or combinations, with his tiles. It's sort of like playing Pinochle, or Mah Jongg, only it's a board game. Some melds enable capture of an opposing tile (think Nine Men's Morris). Some melds score points. Some melds hedge in or block the opponent. Some melds open up transitions to new states or levels of the game.

And then there's all the extra, incredibly intricate rules and exceptions to rules. The rules of the Quintuple Arcana are so mind-bogglingly complex, they make Chess seem like Tic-Tac-Toe; though after a while you can see how the rules all have a certain "feel" to them.

I started working on the Quintuple Arcana at age 18. At first it was just vague wisps drifting across the back of my mind, like colored tissue paper wafting on the breeze. Bits and pieces and dimly-beheld snatches of the way this game of games ought to be. I had to get into just the right meditative frame of mind, into a state of flow; and even then I couldn't force it, the game just came to me, a detail here, an exception to the rule there. I must've been doing something right: after a while magic squares and other mathematical surplusage began dropping out of the rule structure unbidden.


Fig. 2  The Quintuple Arcana Board

The board for the Quintuple Arcana is made of yellow leather, marked in green and black and red. In the middle of the board is a cross-hatched area, called the Confluence (think Chinese Chess). The two players are known as Red and White, and each player stays on his own side of the Confluence.

Each player has eighteen points on which to play and move his tiles: fifteen points of intersection, a three-by-five grid known as the Quinquedecade; plus three other points known as Stations, one in each corner and one off to the right-hand side.

The points of the Quinquedecade fall into five metals and three colors. The metals, starting from each player's left hand and moving across to the right: quicksilver, silver, copper, gold, and iron. The colors, starting closest to the player and moving up toward the Confluence: green, blue, and red. Silver and gold are the stronger metals, and red is a very strong color. A meld formed on red is very powerful, but also more vulnerable. The specially marked point on gold at blue is also known as the stone point: associated with it are certain privileges and restrictions of move.

Note how Red's quicksilver is located right across from White's iron, and Red's silver right across from White's gold. Red's copper and White's copper stand across from each other, which leads to special rules for when one player already has a certain tile on copper, and the other player tries to move an identical or similar tile to copper.

The two corner stations, indicated by large circles, are known as the yellow stations. Tiles moved to the yellow stations tend to alter rules and rankings across the board. The color of these stations is yellow, the metal of these stations is wood. For purposes of tile movement, these stations are not considered as being diagonally behind the Quinquedecade, but rather as the color behind green, or the metal next beyond quicksilver or iron.

The station to the right of the Quinquedecade is represented by an old Eslonikese syllabic sign, and is known even in Hermetic by its old Eslonikese name of the cra, that is, the mode, or the state of being. The cra is invested with certain powerful immunities, and tiles in this station extend some of those immunities across the board.


Fig. 3  The Quintuple Arcana Tiles

Each player has two dozen wooden tiles, black enamel with red felt on the underside. The tiles are divided into three categories: number tiles, suit tiles, and odd tiles.

A player has two each of number tiles from one through five. One is a green eagle bearing a crozier and a thunderbolt. Two is two crescent moons, to Hermetics the twin moons which govern the rainfall. Three is three beams of sunlight shining through the clouds. Four is an Esloniki working a ritual, holding a torch over a basin of water between the two pillars of the four elements. Five is five heptalphas or seven-pointed stars.

The suit tiles fall into three suits, urns, suns, and lightning. Each suit has four ranks, suit signs (low), volcanos or firesprings, dragons, and comets (high). In the suit of suns, the phoenix replaces the dragon. And in the rank of suit signs, the suit itself becomes the rank. Under special conditions, the rank of suit signs can "pivot" to become a fourth suit, the suit of heptalphas or seven-pointed stars.

The names of the twelve suit tiles, in English, are urn comet, sun comet, lightning comet; urn dragon, sun phoenix, lightning dragon; urn firespring, sun firespring, lightning firespring; burning urn, rising sun, thunder sword.

The two odd tiles are the tower and the eclipse. These are used to alter the legal moves of other tiles aligned with them on the board, the tower extending the moves of one's own tiles, the eclipse blocking one's opponent's tiles.

The rank of the tiles, as well as the tiles constituting a meld, can shift radically according to the "conditionalization" of the board, influenced chiefly by tiles in the yellow stations. For example, in (default) five-hexatonic mode, a meld known as the major sequence consists of the three number tiles five, four, three, arranged in any order in a straight line on any three adjacent points of the Quinquedecade. But in three-hexatonic mode, the major sequence consists of the number tiles three, five, two; and in four-heptatonic mode, the major sequence is four, one, three.


Fig. 4  The Quintuple Arcana— A Scoring Position

The game begins with the board empty. Red and White alternate turns, and in each turn a player may either enter, or move, or remove, or reenter one of his tiles. As the tiles build up and shift on the board, each player strives to form melds, gaining advantage for himself, or imposing disadvantages on his opponent. Play may appear to be blocked; then changing to a different mode opens up a whole new set of possible moves and melds.

In the position shown above, White scores by moving a four from the cra to iron at blue. This gives White three melds: a secondary sequence (sun phoenix, sun firespring, rising sun), vertical on quicksilver; a pair of fives, vertical on copper at green and blue; and a major sequence (four, five, two), horizontal on blue, according to the four-hexatonic mode induced by the urn comet in the yellow station.

The secondary sequence and the pair together meet the "configuration readiness" precondition for White to score by closing the major sequence with the move from the cra: advais cvadro viro sajoro, "moves four to iron at blue." White's score for his position is as follows: basic score for major sequence, 20 points; score for pair united with major sequence, 4 points; score for closing meld from a station, 2 grace; score for purity of tile (quinquedecade has only number tiles plus one suit), 20 points. No doubles means a multiplier of one, 44 points times 1 plus 2 grace equals 46 points total. Note 46 points worth of scoring bars awarded to White at bottom of board, above.

Whew! Like I say, I've been working on this game for over 30 years, and I'm not there yet. I've got a notebook densely filled with over 70 pages of rules, add in another 20 pages I've got in loose leaf and we'd be getting close to the complete rules on first level. But then the game goes to second level, and third, and... I'll never get there. I'll never get it finished. Meanwhile, on the lid of the scoring-bar box, there's me, my dog, and a Camel from outer space, watching two Esloniki playing the Quintuple Arcana, in that land where the sun is eternally rising in the west...

Chess

Most of my young adult years, age 18 to 35, I spent in academia living under the poverty of student life. Ramen noodles. Ragged blue jeans. At one point I neither had nor could afford a bed, and so for a year I slept on a rubber mat on the floor. Once I finally bailed out into the real world, I was astonished to discover that I could actually purchase non-necessities. You know, more than just an ascetic budget of food, clothing, and shelter. I started buying items I called my gear. First piece of gear I ever bought, back in 1993, was a Swiss Army knife which I still have and use. Second item was my old Hudson's Bay point blanket. And my third piece of gear was a Chess set.

I've always been a fanatic about games. I got a big, solid wood chessboard, 21" on a side. I got ebony and boxwood chessmen, Staunton, lead weighted, leather pads underneath. That aweful Platonic light that burns at the heart of all games burns especially hard and bright from within the game of Chess. To see into Chess is to see deeply into a transcendent mystery. I wanted a Chess set that said all this eloquently. Chess set, Chess set, burning bright, in the forests of the night...

Chess and I go back a long way together. I learned the moves of the pieces at age three, enough to play a rough Chess game, more or less. I learned the finer details at age nine— castling queenside, capturing a pawn en passant, 50-move draw rule, etc.— to be honest, I was a little disappointed that there weren't more such irregular rules, I had imagined an endless cloud of little exceptions and irregularities. I played Chess whenever I could. For some reason I preferred to play black. My favorite chessman was the Knight.

In high school we organized a Chess Club, with Mr. Hansen as our advisor. We attended one Chess tournament, then the principal told us the school couldn't afford the gas money for the van. Hunh, I was on the cross-country team, which took the van to every away meet, and gas was no problem. We planned to hold a school Chess tournament, wondered if we could get a Chess trophy to be engraved and placed in one of the three huge ceiling-to-floor glass trophy cases in the lobby of the high school. The principal said a trophy would cost too much, never mind that they spent twice as much on the uniform of a single football player. We scheduled a meeting of the Chess club in the business room during homeroom, then after the regular announcements that morning the principal came on the intercom to announce that the meeting of the Chess club was canceled. He did this on his own say-so, since (if you hadn't figured it by now) he hated Chess and thought that pursuits of the mind were stupid.

There was a lot of petty anti-intellectualism like that in the culture back in those days; they called our high school the "Sports Academy," anything but sports could go hang.

But then Chess has often been something of a countercultural pursuit, hasn't it? Longhaired players in coffeehouses. Crazy Paul Morphy. Crazy Wilhelm Steinitz. Crazy Akiba Rubinstein. Crazy Bobby Fischer. Chess as a pursuit that absorbs all your energies and renders you unfit for any other serious pursuit in life. Alice, the Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass.

At one point there, late teens and early twenties, I was beginning to get middling good at Chess. Knew what I was up to when I made a move, not just a pawnpusher. I was even learning various chess openings, Ruy Lopez, Giuoco Piano, King's Gambit, Sicilian Defense, Caro-Kann, King's Indian Defense, Queen's Gambit. But I let it go, I could see that the only way to get really good at it was to let it become an endless sinkhole for my energy.

Chess is one of the deepest games ever devised. Only the Game of Go has a reasonable claim to be deeper, though the Game of Shogi or Japanese Chess also comes close.

If Chess has a shortcoming, in my eyes it's precisely that, in order to play well in today's world, you need to memorize an encyclopedic load of openings. A game like this should be more amenable to strategic analysis than to rote memorization. Plus, well, computers have made massive inroads into Chess, haven't they? I'm one of those reactionaries who, in the rivalry between Man and Machine, still root for Man. But it's a losing battle. In the end the Machine will win.

Still there's nothing quite like Chess. It's a beauty of a game, a piece of Platonic archetype trapped and imprisoned in board and boxwood and ebony, like a fly caught in amber.

The Courier Game

The Courier Game (das Kurierspiel) is a German chess variation which originated in the early 13th century and continued as a popular game for several hundred years. In the mid 1700s it was still being played in the village of Ströbeck, though by 1825 visitors there found it extinct. You'll also see the Courier Game referred to as "Courier Chess."

The game is played on an 8x12 board, with 24 pieces on each side. Each player has a white square in his right-hand corner. Most sources put the king on a square of its own color, the opposite of modern Chess. White's pieces, moving along the back row from left to right, are the rook, knight, bishop, courier, counsellor, king, queen, fool, courier, bishop, knight, and rook.

The rook has the same move as the modern rook, any number of spaces straight on an open rank or file.

The knight has the same move as the modern knight, one space straight and one space diagonal, leaping over any intervening piece.

Next comes the bishop, which has the old medieval bishop's move: two spaces diagonally, neither more nor less, and (like the knight) leaping over any intervening piece. You'll notice, I use a different piece, not a bishop, to represent the bishop in the Courier Game.

This is because the piece that comes next, the courier, moves exactly like our modern bishop, any number of spaces diagonally along an open diagonal. Hence the piece I use to represent the courier is a bishop. Historically speaking, the courier was the first piece to have the unlimited diagonal move of today's bishop.

Next in from the courier come two other new pieces. The mann or counsellor— that biggish piece next to the king— moves just like the king, one space in any direction, only it is a fighting piece: it can be captured like any other piece, and unlike the king it is not subject to check. The schleich or fool— the small rook next to the queen— moves like a rook, but only one space at a time: one space forwards, backwards, or sideways.

Finally we have the king, which moves like our modern king, one space in any direction. And the queen moves like the old medieval queen, one space diagonally.

The pawns move one space straight forward, and capture one space diagonally forward. They can't move two spaces on their first move (partial exception in a moment), and thus there is no capturing a pawn en passant.

In the Courier Game the standard opening is for each player to advance his queen's pawn and rook's pawns two spaces, and his queen to queen three. After these initial four exceptional moves, the game proceeds with pieces moving normally.

There is no castling. Of course, the object of the game is to put the other player's king in checkmate. The rule for stalemate in the Courier Game is unknown; until the 19th century the status of stalemate varied considerably in Chess.

The rule for pawn promotion is also unknown: on reaching the eighth rank, the pawn could perhaps have been promoted to the relatively weak queen, as in medieval Chess. Or, as H.J.R. Murray has suggested, perhaps pawn promotion followed the complicated rules of another Chess variation played in Ströbeck: on reaching the eighth square, the pawn had to make three "joyleaps" backward to the 6th, 4th, and 2nd squares to be promoted to queen. These joyleaps did not have to occur on consecutive turns, and the pawn could not capture, or leap over pieces, while moving backwards. While on the 8th square the pawn was immune from capture.

Back in the old days it was held that the courier was the most powerful piece in the game, though actually the rook must have been stronger.

I made my set for the Courier Game in high school back in the early 70s, when I turned out sets for a number of Chess variations as an art project. The board is red suede leather, with the black squares drawn on in India ink. The pieces were cannibalized from several sets of chessmen.

The Courier Game is slow compared to modern Chess, but nonetheless it's quite playable.

Katsura Komadai for Shogi

Recently I got a very nice board for the game of Shogi, or Japanese Chess— a big, thick, heavy butcher block of a board, made of Japanese katsura wood, and standing on legs.

Now just yesterday I received in the mail from Japan some more Shogi items, this time two finely made komadai, or small wooden stands, which you will see flanking the board above. The komadai are also made of katsura, and their purpose is to hold captured Shogi pieces. Reason being, when you capture an opponent's piece you can hold it and reenter it as your own on a later turn. This reentry of captured pieces is a major way Shogi differs from Western Chess.

The setup shown is from toward the end of game 2 in the 64th annual Meijin tournament between the defending Meijin, Moriuchi Toshiyuki, and 9-dan challenger Tanigawa Koji, April 25-26, 2006.

Once again, David Hurley of Hirohurl.net was very helpful in obtaining this special custom order for me. If you're looking for quality Shogi items, his site is the place to go.

Update, 9/07: Hirohurl.net is now Japanese Games Shop.

Checkers and Checkerboard

I ran across this checkerboard and this set of checkers at an antique shop down in Marquette on Monday. Another find for my game collection!

The checkerboard is made of lithographed cardboard, with a solid wood frame around the edge. Made by J. Pressman & Co., Inc. I thought it looked like 1930s, and sure enough, googling around I find people dating this board to the 30s.

Checkers, unrelated to the board, Built-Rite Checkers. Very solid handsome interlocking checkers, black and light tan. Looking around online, I can date these checkers to 1943. Hard to figure just what they're made of. Bakelite? Could be.


On the back is a board for Chinese checkers. "Hop Ching Checkers." Marbles not included.

Hungarian Playing Cards

A reader in Budapest, Hungary noticed the US-made Hungarian playing cards I featured in a previous post, and so he very kindly sent me some Hungarian card decks. Thank you very much, Tamás! It was very kind of you.

Here are some photos of the beautiful cards Tamás sent me, along with notes in which I draw on his explanation of these cards:


Fig. 1  Regular Hungarian cards, a 32 card deck. Cards measure about 4"x2½". These cards are used for skat, bézique, klaberjass, and other Hungarian card games.

The suits are red (not "hearts"), green (not "leaves"), acorns, bells. If there is a rank among suits, red is the highest. Notice how many of the cards, including pip cards and aces, have pictures or scenery on them.


Fig. 2a  Hungarian Tarokk cards, uses a 42 card deck in Hungary but 54 cards in Western Europe. Cards are quite large, measuring about 5"x3", and the cards have no indices in the corner. This deck contains 54 cards, from which 12 pip cards can be discarded to yield the 42 card deck. Tamás says that Tarokk is a very popular card game in Hungary; I find an account of the rules here, looks like an intricate and fascinating game, and quite unlike any other card game I'm acquainted with.

The 42 cards in the Hungarian game include five cards in each suit: in spades and clubs the cards rank king (high), queen, rider, jack, ten (low); in hearts and diamonds the cards rank king (high), queen, rider, jack, ace (low). The deck also includes 21 numbered cards with Roman numerals ranking from XXI (high) down to I or pagát (low), plus an unnumbered card called skíz which looks a little like a joker and is the highest card of all. The skíz, XXI, and pagát are known as honors.


Fig. 2b  As you can see, the numbered cards have very curious designs on them. Tamás tells me these designs date back to Hungary and Austria in the early 19th century.


Fig. 3  A reprint of Hungarian cards from the 1860s. 32 card deck, quite small, with the cards measuring about 3 5/8"x2 1/8". The box is labeled in Hungarian Tell Vilmos, or as we would say in English, William Tell. The original manufacturer is given as "Salamon Antal, Keczkemet": Tony Salamon, in Keczkemét, which is about 60 kilometers east of Budapest.

The designs on the cards are very delicate and old-fashioned looking. Tamás mentions an interesting point: the Red Lower (what we would call the Jack) wears a red rounded cap. In cards designed after the 1920s, this was changed to a green cap, since the red cap was called a "Jewish cap" at that time.

Three beautiful card decks from Hungary, and they make a wonderful addition to my playing card collection. Once again, thank you, Tamás! As I've remarked before here on my blog, one of the great things about the Internet is the way it brings together individuals from around the world.

The New Japanese Chess Board Is Here!

Yes! It arrived this morning, all the way from Japan! The new Japanese Chess board, a block of solid wood, thick as a butcher block, standing on legs, a thing of rare beauty. It arrived this morning from Japan, and I am simply going out of my game-addled gourd!

Game fanatic that I am, I've been fascinated with Japanese Chess, or Shogi, ever since age 14 or 15. Of course back in those days— we're talking early 70s— there was no way on earth that I, living in the American Midwest, was going to latch onto a quality Shogi set. So I made do with what I could: a homemade set I turned out myself; a cheap little travel set from Japan. For many years, I made do.

Fast forward to a bit over a year ago, when at long last I found a site called Hirohurl.net, which offers beautiful Shogi pieces and Shogi boards, and which is written in English. So I ordered a folding wooden Shogi board, and some Siamese boxwood Shogi pieces with Japanese characters incised into them. I was very pleased with these items, and with the service provided by David Hurley, the mastermind behind Hirohurl.net.


Recently the idea entered my mind of getting a really nice traditional Shogi board— like I say, solid wood, thick as a butcher block, standing on wooden legs. Boards like these are not cheap, you understand; and the thicker they are, the costlier. What I had in mind turned out to be a custom order. I emailed David Hurley, and he was very helpful in obtaining for me the kind of board I was looking for.

He packed it very, very carefully, too. And this morning Mr. Mailman showed up on my front step with an express package from Japan.


The new Shogi board is made of katsura wood from the island of Hokkaido. It measures 13" by 14 1/4", and the board is about 4 5/8" thick. The wooden legs underneath the board are 3 5/8" tall, so the entire thing stands about 8 1/4" high.

It's heavy. Heavy! I don't have any scales handy, but just hefting it, I'd hazard a good 15 or 20 pounds as a ballpark estimate. And underneath, on the bottom of the board, is carved the traditional pyramid-shaped hollow in the wood.

This is the kind of Shogi board I've been dreaming about for 35 years now. It's an absolutely beautiful board, and it really is a dream come true.

Update, 9/07: Hirohurl.net is now Japanese Games Shop.

Samba — Triple Deck Canasta

Here's that Samba set I ran across in an antique shop recently— Samba is pretty much like Canasta, only played with three decks instead of two. With the added possibility of a seven-card sequence meld called a "samba."

Note, decks still in original cellophane wrappers, with old-fashioned tax stamp. And made by the ARRCO Playing Card Co., Chicago.

Playing Cards and the Fifth Suit of Eagles

For a good 40 years now, complete game fanatic that I am, I've been wondering what the fifth suit of eagles looked like. Well, now at long last I know. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I know what the suit of eagles looked like.

See, back in the 1930s they briefly came out with a 65-card deck which included the usual spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds, plus a fifth green suit known as eagles. Back when I was a kid, grade school, early or mid 1960s, I ran across this fact in the glossary at the back of my Dad's dogeared copy of The Official Rules of Card Games: Hoyle Up-to-Date, 46th edition (1948).

A fifth green suit of eagles! I was galvanized. Already at that age I had awakened to the aweful platonic mystery that burns at the heart of all games. That there had once, however briefly and fleetingly, been a suit of eagles... to me, this came as a mystic revelation on par with news of a fifth element ranking alongside earth, air, fire, and water.

Over the years I kept an eye out for any further notice about this fifth suit of eagles. I'd run across mention of it every now and then, usually in some book about card games. Always the mention was terse and nondescript. What did the suit sign for the suit of eagles look like? Other than that it had been green, no description.

Around age 12 or 13, I sent a letter to the United States Playing Card Company in Cincinnati, asking if they had any five-suit decks with the suit of eagles. They wrote back to me that their stock from the 1930s was long since exhausted, and they didn't know where I could obtain a deck.


I made a few attempts myself at designing a suit of eagles. The two cards on the left are from a complete 13-card suit of eagles I drew up, possibly in my junior high years, possibly earlier. All 13 cards, including some abysmally drawn face cards— suit signs were always more my forte. Note the simple and almost geometric green eagle suit sign.

I was very much into the idea at that age that suit signs, wherever they wafted out there in Platonic hyperspace, had to be iconic and at the same time archetypal in some deep, resonant sense. I assumed (as I still in some sense assume) that "deep" suit signs are real, real in some almost Platonic sense, and that our task is but to intuit them by seining and dredging deep within. (As you can tell, I have never been altogether brought over into the realm of deracinated Western modernity: there is an atavistic premodern streak in me a mile wide, and I have always been quite at home with it.)

Then some time into my high school years, early 1970s, I made another try at designing a green eagle suit sign. Note the card on the right, the seven of eagles with the swirling, curving abstract eagles. Much more of a piece with the curving, abstract design of clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds. My curving eagles looked like triskelions, only four-armed: three arms swirling counterclockwise and the fourth arm curving the opposite way, clockwise, to form head and wings and tail. I think I was onto something here.

(And if I remember correctly, this playing card— with swirling green eagle suit signs and blue clouds in the background— came to me originally in a dream.)


And there matters stood. For decades. Wondering what the suit of eagles looked like, wondering but never knowing. Brief references, never any description. No description, not even in James Blish's science-fiction novel Jack of Eagles, an earlier and shorter version of which was entitled Let the Finder Beware. (Hence the name of my blog.) Even when I eventually got on the Internet, I searched and searched but came up empty: hundreds of brief references to the fifth suit of eagles, sounding most of them pretty much alike; but no pictures, no descriptions.

Until just the other day, when I stumbled across a picture on the BoardGameGeek site. Then that picture led on to several more, to pictures of old playing cards, 1930s vintage, with the green fifth suit of eagles. I was electrified! After 40 years, here right in front of me was the original green fifth suit of eagles! It seems a single user uploaded several pictures of the American green fifth suit of eagles, and the British blue fifth suit of crowns.

You can find a large, full-sized picture of the suit of eagles here, and all the assorted fifth-suit pictures here.


I must confess, I never would've guessed what the suit of eagles looked like. I like the design, but it's more complex, not as iconic as I would've expected; and yet at the same time rather suit-sign abstract, in ways that only really sink in after you look at it a while.

And after 40 years and more, a longstanding burning Platonic mystery has been unveiled to me. Long have I dreamed of that fifth green suit of eagles; and now at long last my eyes have beheld it in its original form.

The Marble Game

Someone around here recently gave me a classic old board game. The marble game! I think he made several of these from lumber which had been stored in his barn for decades. Very cool, natural wood grain and distressed hardwood, a classic piece of Americana.

The marble game belongs to a family of race games played on a cross-shaped board, including Ludo, parcheesi, pachisi, the old Aztec game of patolli, and many more. The rules of the marble game are similar to Ludo, except that a roll of 1 has the same privileges as a roll of 6. Around the track you go, and you can be almost home when an opponent's marble lands on yours and sends it back to the start.

A very nice addition to my collection of board games.

Mad About Playing Cards, Part 2

Continued from Part 1 yesterday...


Fig. 6  Mexican playing cards, 40-card deck with Spanish suit signs of swords, clubs, cups, and coins. "Intransparente, Marco 'Gallo.'" This is one of many Mexican card decks I bought on vacation in Tijuana in the spring of 1986. I found some off-the-beaten-path shops, explained in my stumbling Spanish that I was looking for Mexican playing cards. They tried to foist off onto the gringo some Mexican-made playing cards with spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds; but no, I wanted the local product, funky, the real thing.

I think this deck may be my favorite of all the ones I brought back from Mexico: the design and the colors are very fine and subtle. The texture of the pasteboard is also nice, though I'm not sure how long it would hold up under use.


Fig. 7  Here's a piece of real Americana: Rook cards, 57-card deck with four suits— yellow, red, green, black— numbered from 1 through 14, plus of course the eponymous Rook card. (Yes, I said "eponymous": go look it up.) I have several decks of Rook cards in my collection, some of them very recent. But this is my oldest deck: the rule book lists no copyright renewal date later than 1943.


Fig. 8  This is one of the very first card decks I added to my playing card collection, back when I was 12 or 13. It's a 63-card deck for six-handed Five Hundred. Ten cards to each player, three cards to the blind. Your eyes are not playing tricks on you, the deck includes ♠12, ♦11, and ♥13. In fact all four suits contain an 11 and a 12, and the red suits also contain a 13. Count it up, with the joker that makes 63 cards.


Fig. 9  By the way, that joker, with the three gnomes playing cards and smoking in the mist of the dawn, was a more important part of my whole early "aweful platonic mystery at the heart of all games" mythos than you might imagine. To my young mind, that joker depicted the awesome land where cardplayers play cards in the stillness of the early dawn (Hermetic: mna sralo), with the sun perpetually rising in the west behind them, and the drone of vacuum cleaner motors in the background. No, that's far enough: I could go into much more detail, but it would only get more incomprehensible the further I went. Like, completely insane incomprehensible.


Fig. 10  Ah! Finally we come to some playing cards which I myself designed and drew some time in my college years.

Thirteen of the cards are from an unfinished deck, with suits of swords, staves, urns, and thunderquoits. In my own Hermetic language, that's mna zivi, mna cthini, mna chthiji, and mna prontthori. Or, for some reason, these cards are labeled in some rendition of Devanagari writing (you know, as in Sanskrit), with suit names of śaştri, bhastonai, kopē, and chakrē. The card in the upper left, the ace of staves (aş bhastonai kū, Hermetic mna vorthad cthinil) bears the heavy-duty inscriptions, sort of like our ace of spades. In addition to all the quasi-Hindic, I notice handwritten in red ink on the left side of this ace in Hermetic daratha, "paid," indicating that the mercantilist export tax on this card deck has been paid by the manufacturer.

Ditto on the ace of spades at lower right, "Alphacen Playing Card Manufactory, No. 138, Export Duty 1 Cr 50./gr. [1 Crescent and 50 Stellars per gross]." With more red scribbling in Hermetic underneath, indicating that the export duty has been paid, along with a 15-stellar surtax. All this is heavily intertangled with the intricate and immense future-history science-fiction universe that I wrote tons of stories and background on in my high school and college years.

You see what happens when you turn me loose with an entire New Year's Day in which to work up blog posts... I go spinning off into "radioactive core meltdown" utter playing card insanity! ;-)

Mad About Playing Cards, Part 1

I am an absolute fanatic when it comes to classical board games and card games. It's been a long time since I've done any playing card blogging, so I thought I'd put up some more pictures from my card collection. Today we're going for some of my more peculiar playing cards...


Fig. 1  I picked up these old miniature cards something like 30 years ago, can't remember where. A deck of regular (poker) size Bicycle cards is shown for comparison. "Cadets Playing Cards, Revised box adopted 1907." The joker looks like a soldier of the Civil War era. Some of the cards have a slot punched into them near one corner: look at the ♣10. I'm not sure if this was original, or done to them later. The Cadet cards measure 2½" by 1¾". The back, as with some older card decks, is a simple single-color diagonal plaid.

Many years ago I wrote the United States Playing Card Company in Cincinnati, asking for information about these miniature Cadet cards. They weren't able to pin down a precise date, apart from confirming that they were manufactured in the early part of the 20th century.


Fig. 2  Here's an unusual deck, cards with a black background, and the suits in four colors: green clubs, yellow spades, red hearts, white diamonds. I have no idea when these cards were produced, though the style and the linen finish make me think they're older rather than newer. The ♠A reads "ArPaK — Mt. Pleasant — Liverpool."

This is the only deck of this design I've ever seen, unlike the white-background ForColar cards from the late 1940s (green clubs, black spades, red hearts, yellow diamonds) which turn up not infrequently in second-hand shops.


Fig. 3  Most of my collection consists of entire card decks, but I do have a number of single cards people have given me over the years. Here are some playing card backs, dogs, cats, and a horse, which a great-aunt of mine passed down to me.


Fig. 4  Here's a small selection of jokers, some of them loose cards, some of them from complete decks in my collection. Upper left is from Aviator playing cards, upper right is from Bicycle cards (both US Playing Card Co.); lower right is a Tally-Ho joker, lower left is an older Whitman joker. Four out of the six jokers in between are from the ARRCO Playing Card Company in Chicago, and the Redislip joker comes from the old Brown & Bigelow Company up in the Twin Cities, or one of its successors.

I will never forget the time I stumbled across a garage sale in a small town down in Illinois. They had quite an assortment of card decks there— some of them older, too. And a sign posted, indicating that none of the decks had any jokers. I try to fathom the psychology of a person who would routinely throw away the jokers from his card decks but... Grrrrrrrrrr...


Fig. 5  Here's an oddity, a 32-card deck with German suit signs— acorns, leaves, hearts, bells— but distinctively Hungarian in its captions and design. "Hungarian Playing Cards, Made in U.S.A., Western Playing Card Co., Racine, Wis, Poughkeepsie, N.Y." The card backs are a simple diagonal plaid.

These cards are not recent, but I'd guess they're not really that old— 1950s or early 1960s, at a guess? And they show signs of heavy use. At one time there must have been some kind of a demand for cards like these here in the US.

Card blogging will continue tomorrow...

The New Chinese Chess Set Is Here!

Well, the new Chinese Chess set is here. Folding black leather box with board and pieces inside, arrived here this afternoon from Yellow Mountain Imports out in California.


Chinese Chess, or Hsiang Ch'i, is a different game from western Chess. Related, but in some ways quite different. I first ran across the game back around age 14 or 15, when I unearthed a Dover reprint of Edward Falkener's Games Ancient and Oriental, and How to Play Them. In high school, early 70s, I made a Chinese Chess set of my own, wooden disks cut from a dowel stick, board woodburned into brown leather. Also almost 20 years ago I ran across an old battered, beaten, and not very well made Chinese Chess set at an Oriental import shop— made in the East, but evidently used, and almost unusable.

When I was in college, one year I had a roommate from Hong Kong who was a grad student in nuclear engineering. Wong and I used to play Chinese Chess, using my homemade set; he usually wiped me.

Now at last I have a nice authentic Chinese Chess set. To go along with my Shogi or Japanese Chess set. And my fanatical fascination with classical board games and card games in general.

Singularity Chess

I originally ran across this chess variation back when I was a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We're talking late 70s or early 80s. I found this game described on a calendar in the math department library. Thinking back, I'm not sure just what the name of the game was. I call it "singularity chess," or "whirlpool chess," for reasons that will become evident.


I made a board for myself on a piece of leather. Any small set of chessmen will do. You'll notice that the "squares" on the board are not really square— they range from more or less square to semicircular. Even though the "squares" differ in shape, each "square" has four sides and four corners.


Even the two semicircular "squares" at the center of the board have four sides and four corners. (Corners indicated above in red.) These two "squares" share two sides and three corners in common. The corner between them which lies at the very center of the board is the singularity from which this chess variation takes its name.

Since the board layout is a "curved space," straight moves and diagonal moves have to be defined locally instead of globally. A straight move can be defined as a move which enters a "square" through one side, and may continue on to exit the "square" through the opposite (nonadjacent) side. A diagonal move can be defined as a move which enters a "square" through one corner, and may continue on to exit the "square" through the opposite (nonadjacent) corner.


This leads to some long-distance moves which are anything but straight as we think of straight. Notice how the rook's move can take it looping around the center of the board, and right back like a boomerang to the same side of the board it started from.


The bishop's move also loops around the singularity at the center of the board. Thus the same bishop can sometimes threaten a square from two different directions at once.


The knight's move likewise is distorted in an almost psychedelic fashion. (First knight's moves in white, second knight's moves in yellow.)


I don't recall exactly how the pawns moved. It seems to me that a rook's pawn could end up "curving" if it went two spaces on its first move— probably not wise for it to move that far while there are still enemy pieces in that vicinity.


As a pawn reaches the semicircular "squares" at the center of the board, it makes sense to me to have it continue to move toward the far side of the board, even though technically this amounts to having the pawn move "sideways" instead of "forward." (Move "forward" indicated in white.) It looks "forward" to us, and it's the only way the pawn will ever make it to the far end where it can be promoted.

It would also make sense to have the pawn's "forward" diagonals for capturing be through the two corners on either side of its next "forward" move. (Indicated in yellow.) Though this would mean that a rook's pawn still on its original square could capture the opposing rook's pawn on its original square— not sure whether that should be permitted or disallowed.


One odd feature of the singularity, or "corner" at the center of the board, is that a piece which moves "diagonally" through the singularity will come out on squares of the opposite color. Thus the bishop above starts on a white square, but if it moves through the singularity, it will end up on a black square.

Odd game. Back in those days you didn't find too much about strange chess variations like this. Though in today's world a hundred mutant flowers have bloomed: I wouldn't be surprised if there are websites out there nowadays about singularity chess.

The Game of Spades

Yesterday I was digging through a stack of large boxes full of old papers. I've got two whole closets full of these boxes. I moved in here almost seven years ago, I keep telling myself one of these days I'm going to sort through those boxes, and of course I never get around to it.

Well, yesterday in one of those boxes I stumbled across a sheaf of papers, quite a number of games I made up back in my junior high and high school years. Mostly card games. A few of them, I remember. But many of these games had completely slipped out of my memory. Hey, we're talking over 30 years ago, and an elephant I am not.

Here's one of the card games I concocted, I'd guess in my high school years, early 1970s. It's called the game of Spades: not a very creative name, but the game looks quite playable. In some ways it looks like Schafskopf (the three-handed version), which I was discussing the other day. But in other ways my game of Spades has a character all its own.

Number of Players: three.

The Deck: 32 cards (7 low).

Rank of Cards: A (high), K, Q, J, 10, 9, 8, 7 (low).

Rank of Suits: spades (high), clubs, hearts, diamonds (low).

The Deal: Ten cards to a player, dealt three, four, three, with two cards left over for a blind.

Object of the Game: To take a majority of the points in cards.

Bidding: Starting with the player to the left of the dealer, each person may either pick up the blind or refuse it. A player who picks it up contracts to take at least half the points in cards. After he picks it up, he must discard two cards to restore his hand to ten cards. These discarded cards count for him at the end of the hand.

The Play: Player to the left of the dealer leads to the first trick. The winner of a trick leads to the next trick. A player must follow suit if possible. Otherwise he may play any card. The highest card of the highest suit wins the trick.

Trumping: A card may be trumped by any card of a higher suit; that is, a diamond by a card of any other suit, a heart by any black card, a club by any spade. Since spades are the highest suit, they cannot be trumped.

Scoring: At the end of the hand, the bidder counts up the cards he has won as follows:

ace of spades...........................40
each other ace..........................20
each face card (K, Q, J)..........10
each lower card (10, 9, 8, 7)...5

There is a total of 300 points in the deck. If the bidder took in less than 150 points, each opponent scores one game point. If the bidder took in 150 or more points, he scores as follows:

Bidder takes in: Bidder scores:
150-195...............1 game point
200-245........... 2 game points
250-295.............3 game points
300.....................4 game points

Game: The first player to reach seven game points wins.

Loose ends: Already I can see a few gaps in the rules. For instance, what happens if all the players pass? I suppose this would be handled more or less as in the three-handed version of Schafskopf which I learned around that same time: if all three players pass, the hand is played "for least," with no trump, the blind going to the winner of the last trick, and the player who takes the fewest points scoring 1 game point. Various complicated rules obtain in case of a two or three way tie for least.

I can also see how certain elements of the game of Spades tie in to my own elaborate private "game mythos," going all the way back into my preschool years. The rank of the suits, spades, clubs, hearts, diamonds; the ace of spades as 40, and the other aces as 20: details like these had been set in my inward world quite literally by the time I was three years old. Believe me, you don't want to know just how deep that rabbit hole goes. From a very early age, games had a nigh-mystical significance for me.

Overall, a pretty good card game. I'd say I must have made it up back around age 16.

Schafskopf

So after the Lions board meeting last night, some of us drifted on over to Rosco's Place for a few games of schafskopf.

Schafskopf, or sheepshead, in case you hadn't heard of it, is a card game. An old German card game which is played here in this corner of Iowa, as well as over in southern Wisconsin where I grew up. With some differences in rules between the two places. But the main outlines of the game are the same.

Trick-taking game. 32-card deck, aces down to sevens. And (key distinguishing feature) the trump suit is all queens, jacks, and diamonds, ranking ♣Q (high), ♠Q, ♥Q, ♦Q, ♣J, ♠J, ♥J, ♦J, ♦10, ♦K, ♦9, ♦8, ♦7, ♦A (low). Side suits rank A (high), 10, K, 9, 8, 7 (low).

(Erin was wandering over to watch us play. She: "I know how to play poker. Is this anything like poker?" I: "No, it's sort of like euchre, only a lot stranger.")

Four players, two against two as partners, each player is dealt eight cards. The usual trick-taking schtick, each ace taken in tricks counts 11, each 10 counts 10, K counts 4, Q counts 3, J counts 2, and last trick counts for 10. Side winning a majority of points scores one game point, or if they take over three-quarters of points they score two game points; also, one game point scored for winning ♦A away from the other side in a trick. First side to score 11 game points wins.

A mind-bending game, though you catch on to it after a while. The Wisconsin version of schafskopf I learned back around high school age differed in some particulars. It was a three-handed game. Ten cards dealt to each player, two to the blind. Whoever took up the blind contracted to win a majority of points in tricks, playing against the other two players. There was no special value to winning ♦A in a trick, and ♦A ranked right above ♦10, just as in the side suits. Otherwise much the same.

Odd to think that, in this age of video games and computers, some of us still gather to play curious and unheard of games with those ancient pasteboards. Then again, I'm crazy about card games. More on schafskopf, including links to the complete rules of various versions, here.

The New Japanese Chess Set Is Here!

Well, the new Shogi set is here. The Shogi (or "Japanese Chess") pieces arrived in the mail Thursday from Japan, and the board arrived Saturday.


As I was remarking recently, Shogi has been a fascination of mine for 35 years— though only now have I managed at long last to lay my hands on a good Shogi set. This set really is a thing of beauty— Japanese characters carved into the boxwood pieces, big thick sturdy wooden board.

Today is my day off, so I'll probably be sitting around and working through games out of Fairbairn.

And if you're looking for high quality Japanese Chess pieces, board, whatever— check out the Shogi items at Hirohurl, that's where I got mine from. Excellent service, and everything arrived here in Iowa, all the way from Japan, carefully packed and quickly. In fact, Hirohurl has an entire shop of cool Japanese stuff. Check it out!

Update, 9/07: Hirohurl.net is now Japanese Games Shop.

I've Got Japanese Chess on My Mind

Okay, you already know I'm a major fanatic about classical board games and card games. That includes the game of Shogi, or Japanese chess, which I first ran across when I was in high school, age 14 or 15— which is to say, back when Nixon was still in the White House.

I went nuts over Japanese chess. I think I may first have encountered it in a Dover reprint of Edward Falkener's Games Ancient and Oriental, and How to Play Them. I spent hours salivating over the brief Shogi article in the 1970 Encyclopedia Britannica in our high school library. I have memories even of methodically meditating on every minute detail of the rules of Shogi, while shooting baskets by our garage out back.

You understand, back in the early 70s we did not live in a "global" world. If you happened to live in a small town in Wisconsin, as I did, it was next to impossible to find anything much about some obscure board game from Japan. I managed to make my own Shogi set, board with lines woodburned into tan leather, five-sided pieces painstakingly cut from a length of lattice wood, by hand, with hacksaw and mitre box. I played Shogi against myself, I played Shogi against any poor soul I could collar. Usually I won.

By the time I was a senior in high school, I managed by mail order to latch onto the two or three books about Shogi in English which were then in print and available. In those days this meant ordering from the Charles E. Tuttle Company in Rutland, Vermont. I also obtained through Tuttle a genuine Japanese Shogi set: it was nothing much, a tiny portable set, but it was from Japan and the pieces were labeled with Japanese characters, unlike my homemade set where I had labeled the pieces with iconic glyphs of my own invention, which indicated how the pieces moved.

Well. Fast forward to our present era and our 21st century "global" world. Nowadays you can find more stuff online about Shogi than you can shake a stick at. Only, as I discovered several months ago, look around online for a real Shogi set from Japan, and you've got two choices. One, sites in English aimed at Shogi aficionados, which however offer for sale only sets of mediocre quality, on a par with the cheap plastic chess sets you see in your local discount store. Or two, sites which offer beautiful, exquisite, high-quality Shogi pieces, Japanese characters carved right into the wood, only the entire dang site is in Japanese, and if you and the Infoseek translation site can't decipher the Shogi folks' Japanese, fergit it.

Until yesterday. When I had the joy of discovering a site, in English, which offers beautiful, high-quality, hand-crafted Shogi pieces. I broke down. I gave in. As a last Mardi Gras fling before Lent, I ordered their thickest Shogi board, plus one of their more expensive sets of Shogi pieces.

After 35 years, at last....

The Game of Jetan, or Barsoomian Chess

Recently I was mentioning my childhood fascination with the lesser known writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, such as his John Carter of Mars series. I forget just at what point in my grade school years I came into possession of a paperback copy of ERB's The Chessmen of Mars. Anyhow, young game fanatic that I was, I was especially taken with a chesslike Martian board game which played an important role in the novel: the game of Jetan, or Barsoomian chess, so called after "Barsoom," which was the native name for the planet Mars in Burroughs' series.


Jetan was played on a ten-by-ten board, orange pieces against black, twenty pieces to a side. One of the most fascinating features of the game was that many of the pieces were able after each square to change the direction they were moving, so that "three spaces straight" might mean "three spaces north," or it might mean "one space north, then one space east, then one space north again."

In high school I turned out sets for various odd games as an art project, and of course I made my own Jetan set, which you will see pictured above. The board I made of leather— it helps to have an uncle who was a salesman for a leather company. The Martian chessmen I made by cannibalizing a couple of different wooden chess sets, and spray-painting the pieces orange and black, adding to a few of them further distinguishing marks.

Jetan turns out actually to be a very playable game. One minor problem, the rules as ERB gave them in his book contained a few ambiguities. Back around 1970 I corresponded with John Gollon, author of Chess Variations Ancient, Regional, and Modern, and he conceded that for a Jetan piece called the Thoat in particular (represented in my Jetan set by the Knight), the ambiguities were pretty well irresoluble.


Then in the early 90s I spent some of my spare time one summer writing a computerized Game of Jetan. The result looks like a crude CGA computer game from the early 80s, but it works, and it will play a tolerable game of Jetan against you. If anyone is interested in downloading and trying out my "Game of Jetan 2.2," the zipfile is right here. Documentation and Turbo PASCAL source code included— "Silver Moon Software Ltd." is what I used to call myself when I was in software-writing geek mode.

Like I say, do you begin to get the impression that I'm some kind of a fanatic when it comes to games?!

Mah Jongg

I've written before about my nigh-cosmic interest in classical table games— board games, card games, throw in tile games and dice games, too. As for tile games, you think chiefly of dominoes; I've also got in my collection a set of Chinese dominoes, which are rather different. But most exotic of all among tile games is the mysterious oriental game of mah jongg. Above are some tiles from one of my mah jongg sets— a wooden set from the early 1920s, when the mah jongg craze hit the United States.


Here's the box for that set: "The Game of a Thousand Wonders: Mah-Jongg 'Junior': A Complete Mah-Jongg Set with Babcock's Red Book of Rules." More: "Manufactured by the Paraffine Companies Inc. for, and Sold Only by, Mah-Jongg Sales Co. of America, San Francisco, New York, Chicago." The included rule book is in its tenth printing, July 1923.


Here are some tiles from another mah jongg set I've got. These tiles are made of bakelite, much more finely detailed than the first set. I'd guess they also date from the 1920s.


These bakelite tiles come, along with bakelite tile racks, in a green faux-alligator carrying case. (My wooden mah jongg set also has racks, of wood, which may or may not have originally belonged as part of the set.)

I first got interested in mah jongg back in my high school years— early 1970s. In those days there was virtually no place you could buy a mah jongg set, outside of an antique shop, which I was too impecunious to afford; though I do recall seeing a new mah jongg set in a department store somewhere— could that have been (local Madison, Wisconsin reference) "Manchester's, East, West, and on the Square"?

Books on mah jongg weren't much easier to come by. One of the few sources in this country back then for items relating to oriental games was the Charles E. Tuttle Company in Rutland, Vermont. I ordered from them the several mah jongg books they had in stock, and read these books cover to cover. Over and over again. Like I say, I took a nigh-cosmic interest in games, the more "far-out" the better. In those days, there simply was no outlet in our culture for interests like this, I was on my own.


The summer I turned 18, I decided to make my own mah jongg set. By hand. Here are some tiles from my set— I based the designs the best I could on pictures in those books. I'd never seen a real mah jongg set with my own eyes at this point— those other two sets, I acquired in my twenties— so the wooden tiles in my handmade set were only about half as thick as they should have been. Still, it was a nice job considering I was flying by dead reckoning, and also considering that I have very little practical talent for "making" things with my hands.


I also produced a box for my homemade mah jongg set. For some reason, I did up the box not in English, not in Chinese or Japanese, but in my own language, Hermetic. Rough translate of the top of the box: "Mah Jongg Set: Chinese style; The set consists of 144 tiles; Handmade; Includes other necessary game implements for mah jongg, except for tile racks." Like most homemade game sets I produced in those years, this one is marked Zinir— "For Export." A quote in Hermetic at the top reads, "Mah Jongg tiles are one of the six or eight most noble games of ancient Terra— Venerable Mei-San, Mei-San's Compendium" (A mythical 40-volume encyclopedia of games from across the galaxy) The manufacturer: "Ivory Star Game Implements, 5ThJ Eclipsist Realm"; which situates my homemade mah jongg set somewhere in the vast galactic "future history" which I drew up and wrote countless stories about in those years.


Well. On the way down to Dubuque last week, I stopped off at that antique mall and found a set of mah jongg cards, pictured above. "Man-Chu, the Famous Chinese Game," produced by the United States Playing Card Company, 1923. Includes a booklet, Foster's Famous Rules for Man-Chu.


Here's the mah jongg deck and the box it came in.

And finally, discounting those booklets that came with the mah jongg sets themselves, here's a more or less complete list of the mah jongg books I've accumulated in my personal library over the years:

• Eleanor Noss Whitney, A Mah Jong Handbook: How to Play, Score, and Win the Modern Game. Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1964.
  
• Marcia Hammer, Learn to Play Mah Jongg. New York: David McKay Company, Incorporated, 1979.
  
• Shozo Kanai and Margaret Farrell, Mah Jong for Beginners: Based on the Rules and Regulations of the Mah Jong Association of Japan. Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1952.
  
• Kitty Strauser and Lucille Evans, Mah Jong, Anyone?: A Manual of Modern Play. Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc., 1964.
  
• Edgar S. Winters, Ma Cheuk as Played by the Chinese. New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1923.
  
• Jean Bray, How to Play Mah Jong. New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1923.
  
• L.L. Harr, How to Play Pung Chow: The Game of a Hundred Intelligences. New York & London, Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1923.
  
• Ralph J.F. Gerstle, Ma Jong: The Green Book. Third Edition. Chicago: Ma-Jong Club of Chicago, Inc., 1923.
  
• J.P. Babcock, Babcock's Rules for Mah-Jongg, the Fascinating Chinese Game. Second Edition. Shanghai, China: Mah-Jongg Company of China, 1920.
  
• Henry M. Snyder, The Ma-Jung Manual. Edited by Robert F. Foster. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923.
  
• No author, Ma-Jong, the Ancient Game of China: Book of Instructions. New York: The Lent & Graff Company, 1923.
  
• Lee Foster Hartman, Standardized Mah Jong. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1924.

Do you begin to get the impression that I'm some kind of a fanatic when it comes to games?!