My dearest table guests, welcome back.
This is the order of the tile, and I am Prim.
You are invited to enjoy issue #9 and this week your inboxes
were full of mothers and daughters and weekend tables,
and Prim has read everyone. The best discard is the one no
one expects. Prim is writing this on the
Thursday after Mother's Day and the pages of this newsletter a
full to the margin with the things you sent in over the
weekend. Photos of mothers and daughters
sitting down to play for the first time.
Photos of sets that were gifts from one generation to another.
A4 table set up in a backyard in Tulsa where three grown
daughters had surprised their mother with the mahjong brunch
she did not ask for but apparently wanted a single photo
from a woman in Portland. That was just two racks, 2 cups
of tea and the caption. First game with Mum and she kept
the extra tile. Prim read them all and cried a
little professionally and then got to work on this issue.
The thing Prim keeps thinking about as she sorts through your
weekend is how much of Mother's Day at a mahjong table is about
the unexpected. The mother who had never picked
up a tile, who turned out to be a natural.
The grown daughter who had avoided the game for years and
finally said yes. The sister who was only there to
watch, who ended up playing four hands.
The game has a way of producing surprise, and the community this
week has been full of it. Prim would like that to be the
spine of this issue because the tagline she has been carrying
all week is exactly about this. The best discard is the one no
one expects. The surprise is the point.
The game that can surprise you can be learnt by anyone at any
age, at any table, and can surprise the players who think
they have seen it all. We will talk about the backup
hand, which is the single most important unglamorous concept on
the 2026 card. We will talk about teaching new
players without killing the thing that made them curious in
the 1st place. We will meet one of the most
patient and skilled teachers of adult beginners in the country.
We will look at the arc of tile design itself, from bone and
bamboo to the acrylic, in your case right now.
And we will spend a quiet moment with the designers who are
making the sets that will define this era of American mahjong.
Pull up your chair. The wall is built.
Let us begin. Let's get started with what
everyone is talking about. This is the draw.
The weekend was exactly what the Facebook groups had been quietly
hoping for, which is to say, full of new players and full of
patient veterans, and largely free of the usual mahjong group
arguing, not to mention a little mahjong movie time.
I hope you all enjoyed that small bonus of game delight.
Prim watch Sunday unfold on her phone and on the TV, because a
professional mahjong writer has professional obligations, and
what she saw was a community doing its best work.
Mothers who had never played were being taught by daughters
who had learned last year. Daughters who had avoided the
game for years were being invited in by mothers who had
been hoping for exactly this Sunday.
And the photos kept coming, and the captions were unusually
gentle. And Prim would like to hold onto
the mood of Sunday for as long as it will last.
One pattern Prim noticed and wants to name a surprising
number of Mother's Day posts this year came from families
where the mother was the one teaching an adult daughter, but
the daughter was the one who had suggested the lesson.
The dynamic was not My mother taught me the game, as it has
been told for decades in this community.
It was I asked my mother to finally teach me.
That is a subtle generational shift, and Prim finds it
significant. The new players coming into this
game are not waiting to be invited.
They are knocking on the door. The veterans in their lives, if
they are paying attention, are opening it faster than they used
to. This is how a community grows.
It grows because the incoming generation asks and the outgoing
generation answers, and the answer is finally, reliably,
warmly yes. The other major event of the
week is a boat destination. Mahjong's Mediterranean cruise
aboard the Celebrity Ascent departs tomorrow, and Prim has
been watching her social feeds fill with pre travel photos of
packed tile cases, luggage tags, and the inevitable last minute.
Does anyone know if they have a good pusher for the ship tables
posts? This is the first major
destination Mashong event of the summer calendar and for the 100
plus players who have committed prim would like to say bon
voyage. The photos from the
Mediterranean Mashong sessions will flood your feed for the
next 10 days. Enjoy them, be gracious, try not
to get too jealous. Save the screenshots.
The cruise circuit is one of the most distinctive features of
this community in 2026, and watching it from shore is part
of the experience for the rest of us.
One quiet piece of news from the teaching side of the community.
Several of the instructors Prim follows have reported a clear
bump in class registrations this week, and the pattern is
consistent. The new students are adult women
who attended a Mother's Day game on Sunday, loved it, and then
went looking for a proper lesson on Monday.
This is exactly the hand off the community hopes for between a
casual introduction and a real relationship with the game.
If you are a teacher reading these pages, check your inbox.
Your spring class may be about to fill.
If you are a new player who is considering a class, the demand
is high and the good teachers are booking out move this week.
Which brings us to crack the card.
The backup hand on the 2026 card.
Prim has been sitting with a concept all week that she has
been trying to get into these pages for three issues now and
she is finally going to do it. The backup hand.
If you have never heard this phrase, it is because most
mahjong teaching is organised around the single hand you are
building, the one you commit to, the one you expose.
On the 1 you close with the backup hand is the one you are
quietly watching in the background, the alternative
route your rat could take if the tiles you are hoping for never
come. And on the 2026 card, the
players who hold a backup hand alive through the middle of the
game are the players who win the most often.
Prim would like to walk you through this.
MMM, number one, what a backup hand actually is.
A backup hand is not a second plan you switch to in a panic.
It is a second pattern you are quietly reading into your own
rack as the game develops alongside your primary hand, and
it is almost always in the same family.
A backup hand is the cousin of the hand you are building.
If you are committed to a particular hand in the 2468
section, your backup is probably another hand in the same section
with one or two different tile requirements.
If you are building toward a specific consecutive runs hand,
your backup is the adjacent consecutive runs hand that
shares most of the tiles you have already collected.
The backup is not a pivot, it is a reserve.
Knowing the reserve exists is what lets you throw unexpected
tiles without fear, because you are not throwing a tile you need
for any plausible hand, you are throwing a tile you do not need
for either of the two hands you are quietly holding open.
This is the direct connection to the tagline Prim has been
carrying. The best discard is the one no
one expects, and the way you become the player who discards
unexpected tiles is by having a rack that does not commit
prematurely. A player who has a primary hand
and a backup hand can discard tiles that look random to the
rest of the table. A player with only a primary
hand discards predictably because her discards are the
tiles that do not fit the single pattern she has locked onto the
table reads her. She loses the information game
before the game is half over. The backup hand is how you stay
unreadable #2 the 2026 card rewards this posture
specifically. Here is why the backup hand is
not a universal mahjong concept, but a 2026 specific skill.
The 2026 card has an unusually high number of hand pairs that
share structural DNA. Many of the consecutive runs
hands share a spine. Several of the 2468 hands share
pairs. The singles and pairs section,
unusually, has hands that are adjacent enough that a careful
player can hold two of them open simultaneously through the first
third of the game. This is not true on every card.
On some years, the hand families are more distinct, and a backup
hand means fundamentally changing direction.
On the 2026 card, a backup hand means holding 2 closely related
hands in the same pocket, both of which are reachable with
slight variations in what the wall provides.
The practical implication is that the player who reads the
card carefully in advance and who identifies the pairs of
hands that share structure will play this year's card with a
flexibility that players who memorized only one hand at a
time will not have. This is less a game skill than a
homework skill. Before your next game, take the
card out, sit with it for 20 minutes, and map the pairs.
Which consecutive runs hand shares most of its tiles with?
Which other consecutive runs hand?
Which 2468 hand is 1 tile? Swap away from a different 2468
hand. Build a small mental library of
adjacent hand families. When the game begins, your rack
will start to sort itself into these families on its own, and
you will find that you are naturally holding two options
longer than you used to. That is the backup hand
technique in action #3 when to commit and how to commit.
The backup hand only works if you eventually let one of them
go. The player who tries to hold
three options through round 8 is not playing flexible mahjong,
she is playing indecisive mahjong, and the difference is
real. The rule of thumb Prim uses, and
which she would recommend to you, is that by the end of round
five you should have narrowed from two hands to one.
Round 5 is usually when the wall is tight enough that exposures
are starting to land and discard patterns are starting to signal
what the rest of the table is doing.
By round 5, the information has arrived.
Read it. Pick a hand.
Commit. The commitment is not a
ceremony. It is quiet.
It is internal. The tiles in your rack that
belonged only to the backup hand become immediately eligible for
discard. The tiles that belonged only to
the primary hand become tiles. You will defend your rack Titans
in one invisible motion, and from round six forward, you play
with the certainty that marks a real player.
The player across from you will not know the moment the
commitment happened. That is part of the beauty of
it. She will only notice in
retrospect that your discard suddenly stopped making sense to
her because they stopped fitting the pattern she thought you were
in. The best discard is the one no
one expects. The backup hand is how you earn
the right to make them #4 the cost of the discipline.
Prim will be honest with you. The backup hand approach costs
you something. It costs you the early feeling
of certainty. It costs you the satisfying
moment in Round 3 when you look at your rack and say, I know
exactly what I am doing now. It replaces that moment with a
longer, more ambiguous middle game where you are carrying more
in your head. Some players love this.
Some players hate it. If you are a player who enjoys
the ceremony of clean commitment, the backup hand will
feel like clutter for the first few games.
You try it, stay with it anyway. After five or six games of
running a backup, the discipline becomes background.
Your rack will feel lighter, not heavier, because you will no
longer be afraid of what you cannot control.
You will know that whatever the wall gives you, you have a path
through it. The game rewards players who can
hold complexity without anxiety. The backup hand is the training
ground for exactly that. Now this publication receives
questions, many questions. And this week the question
arrived from teachers, not students, and it came in a dozen
forms that all pointed at the same anxiety.
This is the table is asking. I finally got a new player to
the table. She is interested, she is
nervous, she is trying. And I cannot figure out how much
to teach at once without overwhelming her.
And I cannot figure out when to correct her, and I cannot figure
out whether to let her lose or to steer her toward a win.
What is the actual method? Prim has a method and she is
going to give it to you because she has now taught enough adult
beginners to be confident in what works and what does not.
This is not the method you learnt from your own teacher
necessarily. It is the method Prim has
refined from teaching Nan and so many others, and from watching
the best teachers in this community work with their own
students and from her own mistakes.
There are 4 principals. Follow them in order for
principle one, teach only what the current hand requires.
The single most common mistake experienced players make when
teaching a new player is trying to teach the whole game in the
first session. The Charleston, the card, the
hands, the jokers, the scoring, the etiquette. 6 systems, none
of which anyone absorbs on 1st exposure.
All delivered while the new player is trying not to drop her
tiles. Stop.
The new player does not need to fully understand the card on
game one. She does not need to understand
all joker nuances on game one. She doesn't need to do the
Charleston yet. She needs to understand the
tiles, the letters and numbers on the card and how the two tie
together. And finally, how to follow the
rhythm of a turn. Teach her those three things.
Play an open face hand. Everything else will be
introduced 1 concept at a time over sessions.
The patience here is not virtue, it is technique.
Principle 2. Expose your own thinking, not
hers. When you are teaching, narrate
what you are doing with your own rack.
Say out loud what you are considering, what you are
choosing and why. Do not hover over her rack and
offer suggestions about her tiles.
Do not ask her what she is going to do.
Do not quiz her on what she should do.
Chances are she couldn't tell you at first anyway.
The new player learns by watching a confident player
play, not by being coached through her own moves.
Your narration is a window into strategic thinking.
Her private struggle with her own rack is where she develops
her own judgement. Respect the privacy of her rack
as you would respect the privacy of a veteran's rack.
She will figure out more faster if you let her figure it out.
Principle Three. Let her lose early and often.
This is the principle most teachers resist, and it is the
one that matters most. The new player must be allowed
to lose games. She must be allowed to make
wrong calls. She must be allowed to walk into
the obvious trap, to expose too early, to fail to spot the
Charleston strategy that any veteran would have seen.
The losses are the teaching. Every loss produces a question,
and the question is the thing she will bring to you later, in
her own words, at a moment when she is ready to hear the answer.
If you steer her toward a win on game three, you have stolen the
loss she needed to have. You have also subtly signalled
that winning is the measure, and the new player will spend the
next year playing fragile mAh shong because she is afraid of
losing. Let her lose.
Tell her you also lost many times and that losing was how
you got good. Then play the next hand.
See Principle 4. Answer the question she actually
asks. When a new player asks a
question, answer only that question.
Do not take the question as an invitation to explain 6 adjacent
concepts. Do not use the question to teach
a mini lesson. The new players attention span
during a game is short and precious, and the question she
asked is the thing she is ready to understand.
If she asks why you threw a tile, explain that single
discard. Do not explain defensive
discarding as a concept. Do not explain the history of
the game. Do not explain the 2026 card she
asked about 1 tile. Give her one answer.
The next question will come when she is ready.
Prim will close this section with the hardest thing to say to
teachers, which is that the goal of teaching is to produce a
player who eventually does not need you.
The teachers Prim most admires are the ones whose students are
playing confident, independent mashong within a few months.
The teachers whose students are still deferential to them five
years later have, however, warmly failed.
Let your new player become her own player.
The best gift you can give her is the confidence to walk into a
table of strangers and hold her own.
That gift takes patience. The patience is the method.
The rest is details. Now, this publication makes it a
point to recognise those who distinguish themselves in the
community. Not through volume.
Heavens no. Through substance.
This is who's talking. And this week we are talking
about a teacher whose voice is the voice of the patient table.
Her name is Toby Salk, she is a long time American Ma Chong
teacher with a substantial online following, and her
teaching voice is as close to the ideal Prim has described in
the table is asking as any voice in the contemporary community.
Toby has built her practice around the adult beginner, which
is the demographic this game is attracting in the largest
numbers right now, and the pacing of her instruction, the
patience of her explanations, and the warmth of her presence
make her exactly the right feature for an issue about
teaching without overwhelm. She teaches at the speed the
student actually learns. What sets Toby apart for Prim is
that her teaching respects the actual absorption rate of a new
learner, which is slower than most teachers want to admit.
Most beginner instruction is calibrated to how fast the
teacher wishes her students would pick it up.
Toby's instruction is calibrated to how fast they actually do.
This means more games where the goal is not to close a hand, but
to practice the pacing of play. This kind of teaching looks on
the surface less impressive than a high speed curriculum that
claims to produce tournament ready players in a month.
It is in practice, significantly more effective because the
students who learn at their own speed stay with the game.
The students who are rushed tend to quit within the first year,
and the community rarely notices they were there.
The online footprint is doing quiet work.
Toby's Facebook presence and her broader online teaching
footprint have become, over the last several years, a resource
for adult beginners who are not near a local instructor and who
needs somewhere to go with their questions.
Prim would describe what she has built as an accessible
classroom, available in the kitchen of any woman who has a
phone and a beginner's curiosity.
This is the kind of infrastructure the game needs
more of, not less, and Prim would encourage any reader who
is either teaching or learning to spend some time with Toby's
content. You will find, even if you have
been playing for years, that her framing of a concept you thought
you understood will produce a fresh way of explaining it to
the next new player at your table.
Find her, follow her, send her your beginners.
If you have a new player in your life who is not ready to sign up
for a formal class but who wants a lower stakes way to start,
Toby's material is a gentle on ramp.
Her approach is the opposite of the January learner problem.
She does not deliver confident, bad advice.
She delivers patient, correct, sequenced instruction.
And she does it in a voice that feels like the voice of a friend
who happens to know the game. The community is better because
she is in it. If you have benefited from her
work, Prim would encourage you to say so publicly where she can
see it. Teachers who do this work rarely
hear back from the students they helped.
A few words from you this week would not be wasted.
And now a brief indulgence because this author believes
that one cannot play well if one does not play beautifully.
This is Tile Envy, where we cover it openly and without
apology. Prim would like to spend this
section with the people who are designing the tile faces that
you will be playing with for the next 10 years.
Because the face of the American Mahjong set is in the middle of
a quiet reinvention and the community has not quite named
what is happening. For most of the last 50 years,
the American Mahjong set looked more or less like the American
Mahjong set had always looked Traditional carvings, standard
colours, recognisable but unremarkable.
The last five years have changed this.
A generation of designers has started treating the tile face
as a canvas and the results are some of the most aesthetically
rich game objects on the market in any category.
Southern Sparrows Shih Noiseri work under Jessica Rose Creative
direction is probably the most visible example of this shift.
The tile faces carry hand illustrated floral and botanical
elements that feel at once traditional and completely
contemporary. Prim would argue that Jessica
has done more than any other single designer to demonstrate
that a tile face can be a small work of art without losing
readability. At speed.
The tiles are fast to read, the face is beautiful.
Both things are true at once, which is harder than it looks.
And the rest of the industry is studying her work, whether they
will admit it or not. The Mahjong line has taken a
different approach. 1 rooted in colour palette rather than
illustrated detail. Their spring collection this
year, and the Ranch Dusty Rose line in particular, has shown
that the emotional register of a tile set can be shifted
dramatically by chromatic choice alone.
A set in the right tones does not feel like a traditional set
in a new wrapper. It feels like a different kind
of object. Prim has played on a Mashong
line set recently and can report that the effect on the table is
real. The game feels softer, warmer,
slightly less competitive, entirely without losing the
rigor of the tiles themselves. What the brand has done with
colour is design thinking, and Prim recognises it.
Oh my mAh Shong has been doing something subtler, which is
reimagining the geometry of the tile face itself.
The proportions, the typography of the numbers, the negative
space around each symbol. These are choices most players
never notice consciously, but that register in the reading
speed and the tactile satisfaction of the set.
A well designed tile face is the difference between a set you
enjoy playing on and a set you barely register.
Oh my Ma Shong has been pushing the baseline of what a modern
American tile face can look like, and their spring and
summer drops this year have continued that work. 1/4 name
Prim wants in Your head Bespoke Garden has been doing custom
Commission work on tile faces for clients who want something
genuinely specific to their family, their home, or their
taste. The commissioned sets run in the
high 4 figures, which is not a price for everyone, but the
craftsmanship is serious and the client base is growing.
If you have ever thought about commissioning a set as an
heirloom object, Bespoke Garden is the conversation to open.
The common thread across all four of these designers is that
the tile face is no longer being treated as a neutral, functional
surface. It is being treated as the
primary design object of the set and the secondary design, the
case and rack and accessory design, is being built to
support the tile face rather than the other way around.
Prim finds this development extraordinarily encouraging.
The game is finding its contemporary visual voice, and
the players who are buying these sets are voting with their
dollars that they want the game to look like them, not like
their grandmother's mahjong closet.
Both are valid. The range is healthy, pick the
set that looks like the table you want to play at and do not
apologise for the choice. Now to matters of the calendar.
Where shall one be seen this season?
This is set your rack. Mediterranean boarding is
tomorrow. Destination Mahjong's
Mediterranean cruise aboard the Celebrity Ascent boards
tomorrow, and by the time you read the next issue, the first
tournament sessions will be underway.
For the players going Prim wishes you smooth seas and
steady tiles. For the rest of us, watch the
hashtag. The photos will be unreasonably
beautiful. The wall in the Mediterranean
shot is already a genre, and this year's crop will set the
new standard for what a mahjong cruise looks like on social. mAh
Shong Fever Las Vegas 3 weeks later The mAh Shong Fever 10th
anniversary event in Las Vegas finished three weeks ago, and
the community pulse on it has settled enough for Prim to say
something substantive. The consensus is that the event
honoured its decade well. The fields were large, the
format ran cleanly. The anniversary programming,
including the recognition of long tenured Fever participants,
struck exactly the right note. The community seems to be
particularly appreciative of the way Fever has maintained a
warmer, less intensely competitive culture than some of
the other major tournaments. Several players Prim heard from
described it as the one where you actually make friends, and
that is a reputation worth having in this community.
If you missed Vegas, the Fever calendar has additional events
throughout the year, including a late summer resort event that is
currently open for registration. The next Fever on the calendar
The next major Mahjong Fever event on the public calendar is
a destination weekend in early fall, and Prim will say now what
she said about the Mediterranean cruise last week.
The good destination events fill faster than you expect.
If Fever's warmer culture sounds like your speed, and if you have
been circling a destination event this year, the full Fever
is 1 to prioritise in your registration queue.
Full details on the Fever website.
The summer local circuit is now visible.
Prim wrote about local JCC tournaments in Issue 7 and 8,
and this week the spring and summer schedules are posting in
larger numbers across major metro areas.
Specifically, the Philadelphia mainline circuit has opened for
spring and summer dates, the Atlanta area JCCS have announced
a joint tournament weekend in late June, the Bay Area Jewish
Community Centres are running coordinated sessions through
July, and South Florida is publishing its annual summer
charity tournament calendar. The pattern Prim flagged in
earlier issues is holding. The local circuit is robust.
The destinations are the Spires. Both matter. 1 Quiet note on the
tournament economy Prim has been watching the price points of
tournaments this year, and she wants to note a gentle trend.
Entry fees at major destination events are edging upward, while
entry fees at local JCC events have held remarkably steady.
This is not a crisis and the destinations are still worth
their prices if the destination is the draw.
But the widening gap between the two tiers is worth being aware
of, particularly for players on a fixed budget who might
otherwise default to a destination event without
realising how much more accessible the local circuit has
become in relative terms. Prim will keep an eye on this
and report as it develops. Boarding tomorrow.
Destination Mahjong Mediterranean Cruise Celebrity
Ascent May 15th through 25th open destination Mahjong San
Diego. Double tournament June 5th
through 7th, Open Shriners Mahjong tournament Austin, TX.
June 20th open destination Mahjong Atlantic City August
16th through 18th open mAh Shong Fever fall destination event
open Mahjong World Championship Paris Las Vegas October 16th
through 18th Check your local JCC spring and summer local
tournament circuit Full event calendar at the order of the
tile.com. And finally, because this author
believes every player deserves at least one piece of knowledge
that makes her the most interesting person at the table.
We close with crack intelligence.
Here is a fact that Prim has been saving for the right issue,
and this one Is it. The tile you are holding in your
hand right now, whatever it is made of, is the most recent
chapter in a material history that goes back nearly 400 years.
Mashong's predecessor games, and later Mashong itself, have been
played with tiles carved from bone, bamboo, ivory, horn,
shell, glass, bakelite, catalin, celluloid, polystyrene, urea,
ABS, plastic, and finally, in most modern American sets,
acrylic. Each of those materials changed
the game in ways the players who adopted them did not fully
understand at the time. Prim would like to walk you
through the arc because the material is not incidental.
The material is part of the play.
The earliest mahjong tiles, in the game's late 19th century
Chinese form, were carved from bone, often in two layers, with
a bamboo backing glued to the bone face.
The craftsmanship was painstaking.
A single set could take a skilled artisan weeks to
produce. The tiles were heavy,
beautifully tactile, and extraordinarily expensive by the
standards of the time, which meant that the game was
initially a pursuit of families who could afford artisan made
goods. The bone and bamboo aesthetic is
what the Western imagination still associates with authentic
Mashong, and there is something to that association.
Many of the most beautiful vintage sets in collectors hands
today are bone and bamboo, and the feel of those tiles on a
table is distinctive. They click differently.
They warm to the hand differently.
They are, in a word, alive. The transition to American
mahjong in the 1920s coincided with a broader material
revolution. Bakelite, one of the first
synthetic plastics, had been invented in 19 O 7, and by the
1920s it was being used in everything from telephones to
jewellery to, yes, mahjong tiles.
The American market in particular embraced Bakelite
tiles because they could be produced faster, coloured more
boldly, and sold at a price point that let the game move
from a curiosity to a mass market phenomenon.
The Abercrombie and Fitch sets from the 1920s boom, which Prim
covered in letter three, were often Bakelite.
The look and feel of those tiles defined what a modern American
set was supposed to be. Chris Lloyd, based in
Providence, RI, became one of the most important American
producers of Mashang tiles in the mid century period and
remains A notable manufacturer today.
They're tiles made from a modern resin that descends
aesthetically from the Bakelite era, have the density and
clarity of colour that longtime players associate with a serious
American set. If you have a set that feels
slightly heavier than a standard acrylic set, and if the colours
have a certain saturation that is hard to replicate, there is a
good chance you are holding something in the Chris Lloyd
family or something inspired by it.
Prim would like more players to know Chris Lloyd by name.
The company has been shaping the American tile aesthetic for
longer than most contemporary brands have existed.
The shift to acrylic, which dominates the current market,
happened gradually over the last 40 years.
Acrylic is lighter than the older resin based tiles.
It is easier to manufacture in high volumes.
It takes paint and engraved detail well.
It is importantly cheaper, which has allowed the modern custom
design Renaissance prim discussed in Tile Envy above.
The designers working today can afford to iterate, prototype,
and release limited runs precisely because the underlying
material is accessible. The trade off is that acrylic is
slightly less weighted in the hand than the older sets, and
some players prefer the feel of the older tile.
Both preferences are valid. The point is that the tile in
your hand is the product of 100 years of material choices, and
each choice has changed the play of the game in ways that are
worth noticing. The thing Prim wants you to take
away from this section beyond the history, is a small ritual.
The next time you sit down to play, pick up a tile and hold it
for three seconds before you set it in your rack.
Feel the weight, feel the surface, feel the temperature,
which will always be slightly cooler than your hand.
You are holding a small piece of the long history of human craft.
Miniaturized into a 2 inch rectangle and pass through your
life as part of a game that was being played before your
grandmother was born. The tile has a history.
The history is part of the game. The best discard is the one no
one expects, and the tile you are about to throw is older than
any of us and will outlast most of what we do with it.
Play with that awareness, it will change how you hold your
rack. You're welcome until next week.
May your rack be blessed and your Charleston ruthless.
This has been the order of the tile issue #9 the best discard
is the one no one expects. Do forward this to your favorite
4th. Everyone deserves a seat at this
table, and everyone deserves to be properly informed before they
take it. Until next Thursday, dear
listener. Prim as always.