The text reads very fluently and makes me want to order all the books by Toggle the table of contents Marcus du Sautoy.
I didn’t realise that Mahjong was like Rummy and Poker in that it is a trick-taking game. After reading that, something clicked and I could finally see what it’s all about.
The idea of Markov chain appeared a few times as the best way to model games, e.g. Monopoly. The core of it seems to be that the probability of something happening depends only on the current state, not on the previous states, cf visual explanation here.
Most of the games mentioned are playable online and I have a github repo with links for easy future reference.