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How to play mahjong

The table game, from the first tile to the first win

Mahjong is a game for four people, played with 144 tiles, and it is closer to rummy than to the solitaire puzzle that shares its name. Each player builds a hand of fourteen tiles made of four sets and a pair, drawing one tile and discarding one tile per turn, and the first player to complete a hand wins the round. That sentence is most of the game. The rest of this page is what the sets are, how the drawing works, and what to do when someone discards the tile you want.

Two warnings before the rules. First, there is no single mahjong. Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, mainland China and the United States all play recognisably the same game with different scoring and a few different rules, and any table you sit down at will have house rules on top. This page teaches the common core, in the Hong Kong flavour where a choice has to be made, and the variants page lists what changes elsewhere. Second, if you came here for the tile-matching puzzle, that is a different page; the tiles are the same, the game is not.

The tiles

A set has three suits of nine ranks, four copies of each: dots, bamboo and characters, 108 tiles. Then the honours: four winds (East, South, West, North) and three dragons (red, green, white), again four copies of each, 28 tiles. Then eight bonus tiles, four flowers and four seasons, one copy each. 108 + 28 + 8 = 144.

Suit tiles form sequences and triplets. Honours only form triplets, never sequences: East, South, West is not a set. Flowers and seasons are not part of a hand at all; when you draw one, you set it face up beside your hand and draw a replacement, and it earns a point at the end. Some tables play without them, using 136 tiles.

If you cannot yet tell a 6 of bamboo from a 6 of dots at a glance, the solitaire page shows every tile with its name, and a few games of the puzzle are a painless way to learn the faces.

Sets: chow, pung, kong

Every winning hand is four sets and a pair. There are three kinds of set.

A pair is two identical tiles, sometimes called the eyes. A hand needs exactly one pair. So a finished hand is 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 2 = 14 tiles, or a few more if it contains kongs, since a kong has four tiles but counts as one set.

Setting up

Four players sit at a square table. Seats are named after the winds: East, South, West, North, going counter-clockwise, which is the direction play moves in. East is the dealer for the first hand. Seats are usually chosen by drawing one wind tile each.

All tiles go face down, are mixed, and each player builds a wall in front of them: 18 stacks of two tiles, so 36 tiles per player and 144 in all, pushed together into a square. East rolls two dice, counts that many players round from themselves to pick a wall, counts that many stacks in from its right end, and the deal begins from the break. East takes four tiles, then South, West and North, three times round, so everyone has twelve; then East takes two more and the others one each. East now holds 14 tiles, the others 13. Anyone who drew a flower or season sets it aside and takes a replacement from the far end of the wall.

The dice business looks like ceremony, but it has a purpose: nobody can know where in the wall the deal will start, so nobody can stack the wall in their own favour.

A turn

East starts by discarding one tile face up into the middle. From then on each turn is the same two steps, going counter-clockwise: draw the next tile from the open end of the wall, and discard one tile from your hand. Your hand stays at 13 tiles between turns and is 14 tiles while you decide what to throw away. Discards are placed face up where everyone can see them, and by convention they are never picked up again except by a call.

The whole game is played with the tiles standing on their long edge, faces towards you, so that the other three see only the backs. Each player's tiles are their own business until they are exposed by a call or by winning.

Calling a discard

When someone discards a tile, any of the other three may claim it, but only to complete a set on the spot, and the set must then be laid face up on the table in front of them, where it stays for the rest of the hand. This is where the game gets interesting, because claiming speeds up your hand and shows everyone what you are collecting.

• Pung. You hold two identical tiles and the discard is the third. Any player may call it, not only the next one. Say “pung”, take the tile, lay the three down, then discard. The turn passes to the player on your right, which can skip players.
• Chow. You hold two suit tiles that with the discard make a run. Only the player whose turn is next (to the right of the discarder) may call a chow. Lay the run down, discard, play continues.
• Kong. You hold three identical tiles and the discard is the fourth. Any player may call it. Lay all four down and draw a replacement tile from the back end of the wall, because a kong is four tiles doing the work of three and your hand would otherwise be short. You can also declare a kong from your own hand, concealed, if you draw the fourth copy yourself; concealed kongs are turned to show they exist without showing which tiles.
• Win. If the discard completes your whole hand, you call mahjong (or “hu”, or “ron” in Japan) and the hand is over.

Priority when two people want the same discard: a win beats a pung or kong, and a pung or kong beats a chow. Two players who both want to pung the same tile cannot both hold two copies of it, so that conflict never arises. Two players both claiming a win on the same discard is possible and settled by house rule, most often in favour of the one nearest the discarder's right.

Once you have called a set, it is exposed and locked. You cannot break it up, and you cannot discard from it. A hand with no exposed sets is called concealed and is worth more in every scoring system, because it was harder to build without help.

Winning

You win by completing four sets and a pair, either by drawing the last tile yourself from the wall (self-draw, a bigger win in most scoring) or by claiming a discard for it. You then lay the whole hand face up and the others check it. Scoring is a separate skill, covered on the scoring page; for a first few games, a flat one point per win is enough to keep the table moving.

A hand that is one tile away from winning is said to be waiting, or ready. Knowing what your hand is waiting on matters, because you are allowed to win only on those tiles. The 13 tiles below need any 3 of dots or 6 of dots to finish: either completes the 4-5 run.

Two hands break the four-sets-and-a-pair rule. Thirteen orphans is one of every terminal (the 1 and 9 of each suit) and every honour, thirteen different tiles, plus one duplicate of any of them; it is slow to build, scores the maximum, and is recognised almost everywhere. Seven pairs is exactly that, seven different pairs; it is standard in Japanese and Chinese Official rules and in many home games, but the classic Hong Kong game does not have it, so ask before you go for one.

Ending a hand, and a game

A hand ends with a win or when the wall runs out. Most tables set aside the last 14 tiles of the wall as a dead wall used only for kong replacements, so a hand is drawn when the live wall is exhausted. On a draw nobody scores and the same dealer deals again.

After a win, the dealer seat moves one place to the right unless East won, in which case East deals again. When the deal has gone all the way round the table, the prevailing wind changes: the East round becomes the South round, and so on. A full game is four rounds of at least four hands each, 16 hands minimum, which is why a serious session takes an evening. Casual tables play a fixed number of hands or a fixed time instead.

The prevailing wind and your seat wind matter for scoring: a pung of your own seat wind, or of the round's wind, is worth extra, and a pung of any dragon is worth extra always.

Is mahjong hard to learn?

The mechanics take an afternoon. Draw, discard, three kinds of set, four sets and a pair: anyone who has played rummy will be comfortable by the third hand, and children learn it. What takes longer is three other things. Reading the tiles quickly, which the solitaire on this site helps with. Deciding what to keep, which is the whole strategy of the game and takes as long as you want it to. And scoring, which is the one part beginners should postpone; play for a flat point per win until the rest is automatic, then add the scoring patterns a few at a time.

Two things trip up new players more than anything else. Forgetting that only the next player may chow, and calling a chow out of turn. And holding on to a pretty concealed hand for too long while someone else wins with an ugly exposed one; in most scoring systems a fast cheap win is worth more than a slow expensive one that never arrives.

Fewer than four players

Mahjong is built for four and does not shrink gracefully, but people do play it with three or two. The two-player page goes through the usual adaptations.

The name and the history

The game appeared in China in the second half of the nineteenth century, most likely around Ningbo and Shanghai, and grew out of older card games with the same suits. The name is usually written 麻將 or 麻雀, the second of which means sparrow, supposedly after the sound of the tiles being shuffled. Joseph Babcock, an American working in China, brought a simplified version to the United States in the 1920s under the trademark Mah-Jongg, and it became a craze; the American game with its annual card of hands is a direct descendant of that craze. The Japanese version, riichi, developed in the same decades and is today the most played competitive form.

The solitaire puzzle has nothing to do with any of this. It was written for a computer in 1981 and simply borrowed the tiles.