Ezra Mannix

Have you ever passed an attraction in Istanbul, or (insert famous place) in your hometown that you’ve never been to and thought “Hmm, I really should go there, you know, while I’m living here…Eh, one of these days”?

That’s how I felt every time I passed an Okey salonu (Okey room) or kiraathane (which literally means “starkly lit, tackily decorated storefront coffeeshop filled with unemployed men serving bitter tea and overpriced sodas”).

The ıstaka, or okey tile holder.

The game of okey had always been something that I though I was going to learn one of these days. I was never in any burning rush to learn it. I always figured my time would come, that I would be in a social situation, with, say, my Turkish in-laws at their summer house, sitting around on a lazy evening in the dog days of summer, when one of them would jump up and say “hey, let’s reenact the Battle of Galipoli!” then someone else would say “nah, we don’t have enough plaster cannon balls…I know! Let’s play okey!”

You can hear the sound of okey being played all over Turkey: the gentle clicking of the off white tiles on cheap table cloth or felt topped tables, as a one of the players mixes them around in circular motions with his hands, as if he were waxing the hood of a car with a tissue. The tiles are played from the ıstaka, a two-floor holder of wood, like a double decker Scrabble tile holder. People then seemed, to my untrained, passing eye, to be laying the stones down in patterns, as if playing dominoes.

Actually, the game is really a tile version of rummy…yes, that rummy you played in Mr. Van Ness’ 8^th grade homeroom. The object is getting straight sets of all your colored tiles, be them in different numbers, same color (suites, in cards) in numerical order, or three of the same number, different colors.

The twist is keeping an eye on the joker, the wild card, aka, the okey.

Except if no one explains to you, or doesn’t use the article the while explaining a game, you can run into problems, as I did the first time the tile “hand” were laid out before me on the ıstaka:

My wife Zeynep pointed to an upturned red 3 tile in the middle of the table.

My wife: So this is okey.
Me: Why is it okay?
Her: Because we picked it randomly, so…
Me: Okay, but are my other tiles not okay?
Her: No.
Me: Why not? They look fine to me.
Her: Yes they are fine, but they are not okey.
Me: Ah, you mean the okey piece?
Her: Yes! You got it?
Me: Okay.

Me: So what if I get the okey, and I pass it on accidentally to my opponent?
Her: No, that’s not okay.
Me: It’s not? I thought you said red 3 was the okey.
Her: It is!
Me: Okay, okay, let’s just play already.

I think we had this conversation at least three times that evening, leaving me more confused than when I started.

For some reason I had the idea for all these years that it was mind-numbingly simple game. I think a bitter expat told me that once. I suppose it isn’t very complicated. In fact, it involves about 40 percent skill and 60 percent luck, so there is a lot of things that are out of your control, but there is a fairly high degree of skill going once you get in to the team level (four players, you team up with the person sitting across from you). You can play defensively, passing tiles to your neighbor he doesn’t need, even if you yourself need them, and so forth.

Mixing the okey tiles before a game.

Another bizarre thing about the game is the way the tiles are randomized to ensure fairness. Instead of shuffling them 32 times and having the opponent cut the “cards”, each player stacks the tiles five deep, and puts the stacks into rows. Then each person gently plows them toward the middle, rendering the ıstaka multi functional roulette shuffleboard thingy.

Then comes the Byzantine (Ottoman?) process of distributing tiles to the players. It goes a little something like this. The person to the right of the “dealer” roles the dice once to determine who to distribute the first stack of tiles to, then he rolls again and counts that many stacks to his left, and gives the second stack to the same player, then he goes back the first number of stacks back to his right and adds one and gives that next stack plus four to the left again and gives those two stacks to the next guy. Then, the person counts how many times he/she has eaten liver in last year and divides that number by the number of the last okey tile, or something like that…You get the picture.

When it was my turn to deal, my father in law basically guided by hand like a kukla (puppet). I still say swishing the tiles around and picking 14 is the best way, I mean, we aren’t card counters from MIT.

Once I got the hang of the game, it was pretty fun. Similar to Mahjong and Rummikub, okey can be very competitive, yet it is entertaining and doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s fairly straightforward, but a game can turn on one wrongly discarded piece.

Tournaments are held in kiraathanes and summer house complexes (siteler) all over the country. Tavla seems very one dimensional by comparison, so if you get bored of backgammon, and your Turkish father-in-law opponent is basically moving the pieces for you because you are playing too slow, try okey.