Before going thoroughly into the details of the playing of the game, it is better to give a general view of the play and its object.

Pung Chow is played by thoroughly shuffling all of the tiles face down in the middle of the table, and forming them in a double-tiered, hollow square, called the wall. This wall is then broken at some point determined by the dice and each player draws an original hand of 13 tiles. This leaves about two-thirds of the wall intact, and the rest of the play is devoted to drawing and discarding from this remainder of the wall; each player improving and matching his own individual hand until having arranged it into four sets and a pair, some player wins. A set is three of a kind, four of a kind or three in a sequence. Every set has a scoring value, and the players add their scores and settle after every hand. A player may win with a score as low as 22 points or scores may run to 380,928 points. These possibilities will unfold as the following pages on the details of the play are read.