Show-and-tell time!

This is what’s called a “poker mahjong” set. It’s basically a set of mahjong-style tiles, but marked as the standard 52 card deck of western-style playing cards (English pattern, French-suited playing cards) commonly used for poker, blackjack, gin rummy, et cetera. It goes for around $45 on Amazon.

It comes with two full decks and a bunch of joker tiles and blank tiles in a normal sized case. I think it would be cool to have a small case so that I could just carry a single deck of cards. I don’t know the first thing about making cases, so if you have any ideas, would love to hear in the comments.

The only difference with regular cards is that instead of being colored black and red, there is a different color for each suit: 

Spades ♠️ = black

Hearts ♥️ = red

Clubs ♣️= green 

Diamonds ♦️ = blue

I don’t know if there’s a reason for this or a particular game that this color scheme applies to. I wish they would have at least switched the colors for clubs and diamonds, because the blue ends up looking kinda black, which is disorienting to see on a diamond card. But you get used to it pretty quickly.

This set is awesome for rummy-type games like tong-its. We just use a single deck and set up a wall in an L-shape. After dealing out the tiles, you have a single draw wall, and it ends up feeling a lot like a little game of mahjong.

I can also see this set working well for Texas hold’em or blackjack. My sister taught me a fun game called golf, that works very well with these tiles.

The only game that didn’t really work as well was pusoy dos or other related shedding games like Tiến lên or thirteen. In these games, it’s really important to hide the arrangement of cards and the number of cards you have remaining, which is not really possible with tiles. Also, part of the fun in these games is throwing down hands on top of each other, which would be a bit hazardous with tiles.