A century ago, Western Electric (then the biggest manufacturer of telephones in the world) commissioned Thomas de la Rue to create a special deck of Mah Jong cards for the 1924 Great Exhibition in London.
The cards are truly striking, and we wanted to make a centenary re-release.
The anonymous designer had made use of existing WE graphic elements to substitute Radio Receivers (R) for Dots, Cables (C) for Bamboos, and Phones (P) for Characters. The result is a glorious piece of ancient technological modernity.
You can read more about the Western Electrical Mah Jong set here at the World of Playing Cards site.
Rather than make a complete re-issue of the set, we thought it would be a nice idea to make a version of our Water Card, Six Tigers, and Paper Tiger packs.
Now you can play traditional Chinese card games with Art Deco modernist stylings!
Water Cards and Electrical Water Cards
The Water Cards were straightforward. A Mah Jong set is an outgrowth of the original Chinese cards, so the substitution was straightforward. Here are the designs side by side.
Now all of the Water Card games can be played easily with a new affordable recreation of the Western Electrical stylings. You can get a copy at Make Playing Cards here
If you prefer our standard Water Cards they are available here
Six Tigers and Electrical Six Tigers
A Six Tigers pack adds a fourth suit, Myriads, to a standard Water Cards pack, often (as is the case with our pack) a suit of Fish. A Six Tigers pack can be used to play the traditional Hakka game of Luk Fu (Six Tigers), and the Malay-Chinese game Ceki.
To adapt the Western Electric Mah Jong stylings to Luk Fu, we needed a source of compatible images for the fourth suit. We found it in the Western Electric Lamp catalogue, from which we took a number of graphical elements. In this way, we created our new suit Lamps (L). Here are the designs side by side.
Now all of the Six Tigers games can be played easily with a new affordable recreation of the Western Electrical stylings. You can get a copy at Make Playing Cards here.
If you prefer our standard Six Tigers Pack they are available here
Paper Tiger and Electrical Paper Tiger
This is a 40-card pack designed for playing Madiao (Paper Tiger). Building on the 6 Tigers pack, there is an additional 11 and 12 of Myriads (there is no 10 of Myriads for linguistic reasons). Our pack adds an 11 and 12 of Fish. Additionally, it adds a half Dot card and a zero Dot card to the Dots suit, and the cards are ranked 9 low. To make an Electrical Paper Tiger pack, we had to add two more light globes, and add half-Receiver and null-Receiver cards.
Here are the cards side by side.
Now all of the many Paper Tiger games can be played easily with a new affordable recreation of the Western Electrical stylings. You can get a copy at Make Playing Cards here.
If you prefer our standard Paper Tiger Pack they are available here.
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