r and one may spend the rest of his life in
attaining to past mastery in its thousand-fold intricacies.

SUMMARY OF THE GAME

Before going thoroughly into the details of the playing of the game, it
is better to give a general view of the play and its object.

Pung Chow is played by thoroughly shuffling all of the tiles face down
in the middle of the table, and forming them in a double-tiered, hollow
square, called the wall. This wall is then broken at some point
determined by the dice and each player draws an original hand of 13
tiles. This leaves about two-thirds of the wall intact, and the rest of
the play is devoted to drawing and discarding from this remainder of the
wall; each player improving and matching his own individual hand until
having arranged it into four sets and a pair, some player wins. A set is
three of a kind, four of a kind or three in a sequence. Every set has a
scoring value, and the players add their scores and settle after every
hand. A player may win with a score as low as 22 points or scores may
run to 380,928 points. These possibilities will unfold as the following
pages on the details of the play are read.

[Illustration: Illustration No. 1. The thirty-four different tiles and
the counters]

DESCRIPTION OF TILES

The game is played with 136 tiles, which are divided into four distinct
and separate suits. These four suits are called the _Bamboo_, _Dot_,
_Character_ and _Honor Suits_.

The first three of these suits score equally and are arranged in the
same manner, that is, there are 36 tiles in each, numbering from one to
nine, and there are four tiles of each numeral.

The fourth suit, known as the honor suit, is divided into three parts:
the _Dragons_, the _Winds_ and the _Mandarins_. Of the _Dragons_, there
are four apiece of three different kinds, the Red, Green and White
Dragons. The _Winds_ are North, South, East and West with four tiles
alike for each. The _Mandarins_ (also called _Seasons_, and _Flowers_),
are 8 in number, and as they are only used in limit hands, will be
discussed later.

From Illustration No. 2 a player will see that there are four of every
different tile in the set, and that there are 34 different tiles.

[Illustration: Illustration No. 2--The complete set of tiles]

PROCEDURE OF PLAY

A. EAST WIND.

Position of the players for the first game is determined by a throw of
the dice; all players throw once, the one throwing the hi