3. Tactile Mahjong

Tactile Mahjong

Board game, Chengdu A4 International Artist Residency, Collaboration with Yaxin Ye, 7-9/2021

Touch is deeply related to memory and can easily trigger imagination, but people ignore their communication most of the time. In this board game, the players’ eyes are blindfolded. By coming up with an imaginative description of the tactile bottles, people use their tactile sensibility to puzzle other players and eventually win the game.

1. 2-4 players blindfold themselves, shuffle the bottles and take 3 bottles to start.
2. One player takes a new bottle from the pool when everyone has 3 bottles.
3. When a player has 4 bottles, one either wins or gives one out, and describe what the bottle reminds the player of.
4. The CORE is to describe your bottle imaginatively, as weird as possible. The imagination could be anything related to the tactile feeling in the bottle.
5. Other players decide whether or not to take it. If no one takes it and the bottle is discarded, another player repeats procedure 1. If someone takes it, that player has 4 bottles, and has to do the procedures from 2.