She turned a weekly invitation to learn into a city full of players, and teachers.
Alyssa Gross founded The Mahjong Society in Chicago, which dates its beginning to 2023, and it started with the plainest invitation in the world: a weekly Mahjong Wednesdays, come on a Wednesday and learn. It grew the way a good table grows, from those Wednesdays into private lessons, then into events that sold out, and then into a whole community of players in a city that a few years ago was not thought of as a mahjong town at all.
What Prim admires most is the lineage. Several of the Society's instructors today were once Gross's own students, women who came to learn on a Wednesday, fell for the game, and stayed to teach the next room. In 2025 Gross put the method between covers with a book, Play Mahjong!, so the Wednesday invitation could reach tables she will never sit at. The Society's own words for what it does are better than any Prim could invent: mahjong, they say, is more than just a tile game, it is a way to connect, unwind, and build meaningful friendships.
Written from what the letter said. Read the letter for the whole of it.