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Mahjong for two or three
What changes when the table is short
There is no official two-player mahjong. What there is, is a set of adaptations people reach for when a fourth and a third are missing, and they work well enough for practice or a quiet evening. This page lists the ones that keep the game recognisable, from the smallest change to the largest.
Two players, standard tiles
The simplest approach: play the normal rules with two seats, East and West, facing each other. Build all four walls anyway, since you need the tiles, and deal 13 each as usual. Three things change.
- Chow from any discard. With one opponent, every discard comes from the player to your left, so chows are always allowed. Hands get fast this way; some pairs of players ban chows altogether to slow the game down and make it more about pungs, which is closer to how the four-player game feels.
- Winds. Use only East and West as seat winds, or play that only the prevailing wind scores. With two seats, a full round is two hands, so a four-round game is eight hands and moves quickly.
- Payment. There is only one loser, so the self-draw and discard distinction collapses: the loser pays once. Keep it, if you like, as a size difference: a self-drawn win pays double.
The weakness of two-player mahjong is information. In a four-player game you can read three discard piles and guess what is safe; with one opponent you see one pile, and the game leans on luck more than the real thing. The chow ban helps.
Two players, two hands each
A stronger fix, and a good way to practise: each player runs two hands, sitting in East and South for one and West and North for the other, taking turns in the normal order so that you play against yourself as often as against your opponent. Calls are made as the seat whose turn it is. It restores the four-seat calling rules exactly; the price is holding 26 tiles in your head. Wins are scored for the seat that won.
Three players
Three-player mahjong is common enough to have proper rules in Japan, where it is called sanma, and they are worth borrowing whatever version you normally play. Remove the 2 through 8 of one suit (characters, in sanma), leaving 108 tiles, so that the wall is the right length for three. Chows are not allowed at all, only pungs and kongs from discards. Seats are East, South and West; North is skipped. Everything else is as in four-player: the winds cycle, the dealer keeps the seat on a win, scoring is unchanged. Without one suit's middle ranks, flushes and all-pung hands come much more often, and the game is faster and more swingy, which is part of its appeal.
A lazier three-player option is simply to leave the fourth seat empty and skip it in the turn order, playing with all 144 tiles. It works, the wall just lasts longer than it should.
Solo
Alone, the table game does not survive; there is no one to read. What does survive is tile reading and hand building, and the solitaire on this site trains the first of those. For the second, deal yourself 13 tiles from a shuffled set and practise deciding what to discard, which is the drill that teachers actually use.