Tom Sloper’s Mah-Jongg site is what happens when a FAQ refuses to remain frequently asked and instead becomes an entire field manual.
The archive traces back to late-1990s newsgroup material and eventually moved to Sloperama.com. Update logs show FAQ revisions in 1999, a move from thegameguru.net to Sloperama in December 2000, and conversion of material into HTML in the early 2000s.
The subject exploded from there.
The current index covers basic rules, competing rule sets, books, computer mah-jongg, terminology, tile materials, mystery tiles, restoration, strategy, etiquette, Chinese Official scoring, American rules, Japanese mah-jongg, tournaments, teaching and the history of the game.
There is even a “Rosetta Stone” of mah-jongg terminology because one culture’s perfectly ordinary game vocabulary becomes somebody else’s translation problem.
The history pages are unusually serious
Sloper’s historical sections distinguish documented facts from folklore.
The site discusses early sets, precursor games, Chinese Classical rules, regional variants and the uncertain shape of what it calls proto-mah-jongg. One section notes that no written rules survive for the earliest known tile configurations, making confident claims about the game’s exact “original rules” difficult.
That is a useful habit for any history site: say what is known, then say where the evidence stops.
The archive also preserves the culture around the game. Tournament trip reports reach back through the 2000s. Bulletin-board archives record years of reader questions. Strategy pages contain dated update logs and contributions from players in different traditions.
The site’s old architecture still shows through. Frames, bulletin boards and hand-maintained indexes coexist with warnings that the forced switch to HTTPS broke some older elements and that the site is gradually being made more mobile-friendly.
That technical friction is part of the record.
A modern knowledge base would probably flatten all of this into search results and collapsible cards. Sloperama instead lets you see how the reference accumulated, question by question and revision by revision.
That is useful for researchers because the page itself has a history.