What’s Zung Jung?

Zung Jung is a ruleset for Mahjong created by Alan Kwan. A mahjong enthusiast and statistician, he found the modern mahjong rulesets all contained scoring systems not informed by statistics, historical baggage, or needless complexity that detracted from the basic game of mahjong, creating a less-than-perfect game. So, he set to create his own system which had better game design informed by mathematics,and could be a unifying system that people who were familiar with other variants could pick up quickly and enjoy with one another in both a casual and tournament setting. He picked the name Zung Jung from Confucian philosophy, Zung Jung being the principle of the Middle Way, or moderation, with that in mind.

Because of its goal to be a unifying system, it is used by the World Series of Mahjong as the basis for their official tournament rules, with Alan Kwan serving as head judge and rules expert. Because of that and its popularity in East Asia and Australia, it sometimes goes by a few unofficial names including World Series of Mahjong rules, Australian Rules, Asia-Pacific Rules, International Style Mahjong, and International Tournament Rules.

Alan Kwan maintains the official website for the Zung Jung rule system at his website http://www.zj-mahjong.info/.

I greatly encourage anyone with interest in ZJ to visit the official website. In addition to housing the most up-to-date version of the rules system, it is full of excellent insight into the design of the game, the statistics, theory, and philosophy behind it, as well as resources to help get you started.

I make no claims to the Zung Jung Mahjong Scoring System, other than being a big fan of it. The Zung Jung Scoring System is copyright Alan Kwan. Any and all content I create based on Zung Jung on this website is under the fair use of Zung Jung’s Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Hong Kong License. I have no commercial interest in Zung Jung.