Mahjong

Mahjong is a Chinese tile based game, most commonly for four players, who draw and discard tiles to assemble winning sets of matched runs and triplets, similar in structure to card games such as rummy but played with a set of 136 to 144 engraved tiles instead of cards. It reached its modern standardized form in the Jiangsu region of China in the latter half of the nineteenth century, developing out of older Chinese card and domino games, most notably the money suited card game madiao. Popular legends crediting Confucius with inventing the game are folklore rather than documented history. The game spread internationally in the 1920s, notably through simplified rule sets published for Western players by the American businessman Joseph Babcock.