Doll cards part 2: Rules of the game

Doll cards part 2: The game

The admirable website of Andy Polett has this to say about the game played with the cards:

Practically nothing is known about the game played with these cards, still in production, although their use today seems restricted to very limited parts of the country.

 Mr. Polett is not alone in his ignorance. Even in the Chinese literature, precious little has been written on the game. I have only succeeded in finding three descriptions of the game played with the cards. They are

1: The Chinese Baidu article
2: In a response to a question about these cards on the website iask.sina.com (See Here )
3: In a response to a question about these cards on the website zhidao.baidu.com ( See Here) 

This is what I have been able to make of the three sources. The sources might describe regional variants of the game, which I might conflate. Likewise, my less-than-perfect Chinese skills might cause misinterpretations. With those caveats in place, let us proceed. 


I) Deck : One deck of Wawa pai.
If you do not have such a deck, you can make one using four decks of western playing-cards.
I  choose to represent the Eight Chinese characters of the phrase by the letters A- H and the Dolly card as a "J". The "Marked" cards are represented with an asterisk; so the marked 福 (A) is 福* (A*)

II) Players
The game can be played by three or four people. In the case of a 4 player game, the dealer sits out of each round. The role of dealer rotates between players.  However, in one variant ( from the baidu ask), all four players can participate
In any case, one of the players is designated the "banker", and the others play against him.

III) Deal 
As mentioned above, the dealer sits out of each round. He deals 18 cards to the banker, and 17 cards to the rest of the players. Source (3) states a slightly different procedure. After the cards are

IV)Melds
The only acceptable melds are threes-of-a-kind ( three copies of the same card) and fours of-a kind.
So, for instance 福福福 [ AAAA] is acceptable, as is 山山山山. [HHHH]

However the sequence of cards 壽比南山 [ABCD] is Not an acceptable meld, despite being half of the whole phrase. Neither is any fragment of the phrase, like  比南山 [FGH]

V) Declarations 
Before play begins, players make declarations. If a player has a four-of-a-kind in his hand, he places these cards on the table. He then draws a card from the stock. If that card is of the same kind as the one that made the four-of-a-kind, he adds it to the meld, and draws another. The process is repeated until the card can no longer be added to the meld.

VI)Play 
The sources say Play is similar to Mahjong. From this, I infer the following description of play.

 The banker starts play by discarding an unwanted card. The next player can either capture it to make a meld. If a meld is thus formed, then the player who created the meld must place it on the table.
If the cards cannot be melded, the second player must draw a card from the stock instead. [ if no melds are so declared, ] that player finishes his turn by making a discard.

If a trio is found in hand, one is under no obligation to declare it. However, If a four-of-a-kind is formed, the rules mentioned in "Declarations" take effect.

The process repeats with the next player. One can only capture discards from the previous player. By contrast, in mahjong  one may capture discards "Out of turn" .


VII) Winning
is identical to mahjong. In other words, the entire hand must consist of sets of three or more of the same subject, plus a pair of extra cards. One is dealt 18 cards, but a winning hand contains 19 cards. The extra card is procured by capturing another's discard, or by drawing from the stock.

If the stock runs out, and no-one manages to win, then the pointscore of the cards the players possess (as melds, be they declared on undeclared) is counted, and whoever has the higher score wins.

VIII) Scoring 
This part I find the most uncertain.  I will split them according to the Source.

Source (1) states that the scoring works on a card-by-card basis.

If there are no combinations of cards (see below) , the score is reckoned thus: Each plain card in a meld scores 10; Each stamped card in a meld scores 20.
(若没有任何牌型的平胡，则无”坨“的牌每张10胡，有”坨“的牌每张20胡计分)

Like many Chinese games, certain combinations of cards allow the player's score to be multiplied. The combinations are thus listed by source (1)

a) Collecting melds ( see ss. IV)  that when put together make up the phrase 福 如 東 海 or  壽 比 南 山 , plus having a pair of dolly cards. This doubles the score. 

Sample hand: 福福福福 壽壽壽, 比 比 比 , 南南南, 山山山山 plus two dolly cards.
[AAAA EEE FFF GGG HHHH JJ].
In this case

b) "Big dolly sings on stage"  All the melds involved in the winning hand contain a marked card, plus a pair of Dolly cards. 

c)  Vertical letter Shu Xin ( according to baidu article ). All the melds involved in the winning hand do not contain marked cards, plus a pair of Dolly cards.

Source (1) does not speak about how the combinations "Stack up".  For instance, if a hand fulfills conditions (a) and (b)? If the scoring is identical to mahjong, this means the score is quadrupled.

_______

Source (3) speaks of a slightly different set of rules. Instead of going on a card-by-card basis, the scoring is on a meld-by-meld basis. A meld consisting of only plain cards scores 10, and a meld that involves a stamped card score 20. The source also seems to say only four-of-a-kinds are acceptable.

Returning to the sample hand, source (1) will reckon its score 190x2=180 points. Source 3 will reckon its score as 50 x 2=100 points, assuming it did recognize three-of-a-kinds. 

To make a substitute. 

If you do not have access to a deck of Wawa pai, you can make one from eight decks of wstern playing-cards.  Extract the 1, 3, 5, and 7 in the black suits, and the 2, 4, 6, 8 in the red suits from all the decks.  These represent the Characters of the Chinese deck. For the Dolly cards, extract the red Queens from all the decks.  For the cards that possess a stamp, mark the faces of one of the cards with a dot or similar mark. Alternately, you can extract Seven of the cards from a normal deck, and the eighth card from a large-index deck. 

Doll cards 娃兒牌 Part 1: The Cards

We now come to a kind of playing card, which is vanishingly rare. Used in Sichuan, it bears the name of  娃娃牌"Wawa pai"- Doll cards  or 娃兒牌 " Wa'er pai" -- Dolly cards.

The earliest mention of them I have came across is in the  "Catalogue of the collection of playing cards bequeathed to the Trustees of the British museum by the late Lady Charlotte Schreiber", printed in 1901. The deck is tersely described:

No. 32. From Chungking. Oiled cards, red backs. Consists of eight each of the eight characters contained in a familiar prayer : — 

 壽 比 南 山 福 如 東 海 

That is, May you have " Long life like the southern hills, happiness as (the broad) east sea." There are in addition eight blanks, bringing the total number of cards in the pack up to 72. 


N.B. The Chinese usually write the phrase in reversed order: 福如東海，壽比南山 -- Fu Ru Donghai, Shou Bi Nanshan, i.e. Happiness as the broad East Sea, Long Life like the Southern Hills. A word-by word translation is as follows:

Note; there are two ways of writing the sentence, in Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese is used in the Catalog, Simplified in the cards featured below.

 I will present two decks of cards in this post. They seem to be the only types available at present.

1: "Wa'er pai" .Taizhou Yunping plastic playing-card factory. 72c.
1: 娃儿牌-- 台州市路桥 云平塑料牌厂. 72 副

This deck is made by a company in Luqiao, a town in Taizhou. Taizhou is in Central China, and is quite a distance away from Chongqing /Chungking, which the British Museum cards are from. The Chinese Wikipedia article on the cards says they are used in Chongqing and and Sichuan.  

This deck, and the British Museum Deck are similar in structure. There are Nine subjects in both deck.  Eight of these subjects are Chinese characters that make up the phrase  壽比南山 福如東海 The ninth subject [ in my deck] is a card that depicts the figure of a child, called in Chinese the 娃兒"Wa'er" -- Dolly.There are eight copies of each card, yielding a deck of 72 cards.  One of the eight copies of each subject is marked with the picture of a doll/ child . Cards so marked play a role in the game.

The "Plain" cards, arranged in order. The cards themselves use the Simplified version of the Chinese Characters. The Traditional forms of the characters ( Used in the Catalogue ) are shown below each card. The right-most card, with a human figure is the " Dolly" card. These cards are made of plastic. 

The Eight "Marked" cards. As you can see, each card bears the motif of a child in the middle. In addition, each of the Chinese Characters has a small quatrefoil in the top-right corner. 

On the Marked dolly , a large Chinese seal replaces the human figure, which is placed in the middle of the card. The words on the seal, written in the archaic seal-script are "太平天國" -- Taiping Tianguo-- Tai Ping Heavenly Kingdom.  

2: Wawa pai. [anon] 72c.
2: [娃娃牌]:72 副

The structure of this deck, and the above deck are identical. The main difference is in the material the cards are made of. The cards in this deck are made of a varnished/Lacquered fabric. The manufacturer states the fabric is silk. The faces are a beige colour, and their backs are plain red, in which brushstrokes can be seen. When the cards are new, they are heavily impregnated with a sort of white powder to prevent them from sticking. Cleaned of the powder ( which the manufacturer says is gypsum) the cards look like this:

The Plain suit. Like the cards above, they use the Simplified Chinese Characters. The Dolly card ( far right) contains a much more elaborate human figure than the one featured above. It shows a child bearing a vase of flowers. Also note the cards have square corners. 

The marked cards. The cards are structurally similar to those in deck 1. They possess a human figure in the middle, and the characters have a mark. In this deck, however, the mark is a star/asterisk unlike the quatrefoil of the deck above. 

The marked Dolly card ( Far right) also has a "Seal", but the characters are now written in a more normal font, imitating handwriting . The human figure on that card is missing its face; such errors/vagaries in printing are frequently encountered in the deck. 

I shall describe the game played with these cards in another post. In summary, the game involves forming melds of cards. It resembles mahjong, but it has its own perculiar scoring system.  Melds involving the marked cards score extra points.