In the anime they have automatic shuffling tables, which you can get in real life... but they're not too common since they obviously cost more than ordinary tables. You shuffle the tiles and then make 4 lines of tiles and stack another line on top of that (since theres 4 players, each person stacks their own). In the anime, the automatic shuffling tables will obviously do this for the players. Players sit based on a particular direction, so you will see that each player will pick from 4 random tiles, which are the wind directions... and you sit according to that. The east player will then roll, and this determines where you start grabbing your tiles. I won't go into further detail about how you actually do it, cos its not very important unless you actually intend to play... and if you do play with someone, they will know the rules on how to determine that (hopefully).
So once everyone has drawn their tiles, the person who threw the dice should start with 14 tiles, and every other person has 13. Once you are at that point, the person who threw the dice will throw out a tile to begin the game. Now the aim of the game is to collect sets of 3 tiles, which can be either triples of a tile, or a consecutive straight with 3 tiles of the same suit. There are 3 suits; bamboo, money and circles. There are 3 'honour' tiles (some translations can be different); red honor, green honor, and blank... and theres the 4 'wind' tiles; east, south, west, north. You get extra points for getting a triple of the honor tiles, your own wind (based on where u're sitting) and the prevailing wind. The prevailing wind is what the round is at. The anime explains it quite early on, but basically there are 4 rounds... starting with east, then south, then west, then finally north.
So to win the game, you must have 14 tiles in total which includes 4 sets of at least 3, and a pair. The harder your hand is to obtain, essentially the more points you will get, and because of this... there are some special hands which give you max points since they are so rare. I won't go into detail on these, as there are quite a few... you can check wikipedia for them.
Each of the combinations have special names. They have different names for different rules of the game (theres rules for China, Malaysia, HK, Japan, Taiwan, etc), but I'll just use the Japanese names since thats more relevant for the anime. A triple of a tile is called "pon", a straight is a "chi" and a quad of a tile is called "kan". If you reveal a kan, you draw a a tile from the rear of the stack (I'll explain it more a bit later).
Now for the actual playing of the game... once the person who threw the dice chucks his/her tile out to begin the game, any player may declare "pon" if that tile that was just chucked allows that player to make a pon. Similarly this can also be done for a kan. Only the person directly after that player who chucked the tile may declare a "chi" to make up their straight. If no one wants the tile, the next player will draw from the stack in the middle, and then throw out a tile. If someone declares a combination and takes a tile, they must then throw out a tile to ensure they have a total of 13 tiles including the revealed combinations ( you should only have 14 when you win, unless u had kans). So this continues until either someone wins, or the stack empties... which would cause a draw. When someone throws out your winning tile, you declare "ron", and that player will lose points based on your hand, and you gain those points. If you draw the tile yourself, you declare "tsumo" and all players have to pay the points, and you gain them all.
Believe it or not... thats is a really basic outline of the game... you'd probably need to actually play the game to learn more about it (and I don't feel like writing a massive essay about how to play the game).
So on to the storyline...
The main characters of the story are the girls from Kiyosumi high school's mahjong club. It is the first time they that had 5 people in the club, so they enter the prefectural qualifiers in the hopes of winning the invite to the national tournament. There are 3 other main schools, so theres actually a lot of characters... but I'll mainly just talk about the main ones. Before I go any further, it should be noted that the way the games are played out in the anime are not that realistic.... but then it would be boring if they were too realistic. To add to this, there are many characters who have special abilities which give them certain edges in different situations. With that in mind, these are the main characters:
Saki Miyanaga - As can be seen by the name of the anime... the anime is primarily based off her. She is a first year student. She use to play mahjong a lot with her family, although she never enjoyed it because her family would get angry when she won. She subconsciously developed a method of playing such that she would always get a score of "plus minus zero" which means she neither won nor lost. Eventually the mahjong club gets her to snap out of that mentality, and she reveals herself to be ridiculously good at the game. She has a special ability of... pretty much just luck. She commonly wins by a hand called "rinshan kaihou" which means you win by drawing a tile from a kan. She is the captain of the team and plays the 5th match.
Nodoka Haramura - A first year student, who was the national champion of the middle school tournament last year. She is known to be the best online player under the alias "nodocchi". Her special ability is to be able to view a mahjong game as if she were online, thus being immune to people who have special abilities in manipulating their presence. There is what I would call 'borderline yuri (girl love)' between her and Saki... and I must note that she has unrealistically large boobs for a 1st year high school student (equivalent of year 10 in Sydney high schools). She is the vice-captain of the team and plays in the 4th match
Hisa Takei - She is a 3rd year student and the president of the mahjong club. She is very intuitive and always calm. Her play style is that she will 'wait for bad odds' which means that instead of making her hand such that she could win off multiple tiles (e.g. if your final combination to be made is a straight and you have 4 and 5... you require either 3 or 6 to finish the combination, as opposed to waiting for a 5 when you have a pair of 5's), instead she will wait for a tile that has the least chance of showing up. She plays the 3rd match for the team.
Mako Someya - She is a 2nd year student. Her family owns a mahjong parlour, so she has grown up watching and playing there. She has a special ability to recall the hundreds of games she has played in the past and find the games where the game state is either the same or relatively close to what she has seen in the past, and play based on that. She plays the 2nd match for the team.
Yuuki Kataoka - She is a 1st year student, and knows Nodoka from middle school... having played in the team tournament together (although unsuccessful). She is obsessed with tacos, and they're basically her fuel when she plays mahjong. She specialises in dominating the east round, but as the game goes on longer, she will lose her concentration and make more mistakes. For this reason, she plays the 1st match for the team.
Kyotaro Suga - A male 1st year. He is a friend of Saki, and was the one responsible for getting Saki to first play with the mahjong club. He is the comic relief of the anime, and normally seen buying and carrying mountain loads of food for the team (especially for Yuuki). He has a crush on Nodoka and another girl from another school... who he tends to daydream about.
I rate this anime as 9.5/10, but thats because I love mahjong so much. I think the more you're into mahjong, the more you'll enjoy this anime... its also a good starting point if you've always wanted to get into the game.
My favourite character is Touka Ryumonbuchi, who is the stereotypical rich girl of animes. She has the 'evil rich girl' laugh that is quite common across other animes. Unfortunately I can't find a good picture of her, so I'll settle with a picture of Nodoka (left) and Saki (right) for you all.
Phew that was a long review... I guess that makes up for the days that I missed posting something on my blog =P
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