Although in the West a distinction is made between playing cards and tile games, in China they are subsumed in the term pai (literally, plaque), which can refer both to cards and to tiles. Many of the principles of play are similar for the two forms. However they may be categorized, it is undeniable that their histories are interwoven. The world of Chinese pai games is astonishingly rich. The principal categories of Chinese pai games are games of the money-suit system (including mahjong), games of the domino system, and a large and richly varied category including everything from drinking to poetry cards. Whether or not the invention of playing cards was in some way inspired by Chinese paper currency, it is certainly true that one of the oldest and most important categories of Chinese playing cards is the money-suit system, in which different denominations of Chinese currency were used for the suits.

Sometime in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, a game called ma jiang was developed. The game is played with tiles, normally about 140 tiles for four players. The tiles are distributed to the players, and the aim of the game is to create sets by discarding and picking the appropriate tiles. Dice also are employed, but their use is limited to determining where the tiles are first drawn. This game would become the first consciously “Chinese” game popularized in the West as mahjong.

Another tile game that has remained popular is dominos. The earliest domino sets contained thirty-two pieces, and this has been the favored combination ever since, used for playing games like tian jiu (literally, heaven nine) or pai jiu (literally, domino nine). Later, larger sets were put together based on the twenty-one different dominoes in this thirty-two-piece set.

The remarkable range of Chinese card games include poetry tiles, drinking card games, erotic cards, chess (xiangqi) cards, numbers cards, The Three Characters Classic cards, and specific card games invented by literati that may not have had a wide following. Surprisingly, cards were not used for fortune telling, as they were in the West, although the thirty-two-piece domino set was used for this purpose.