How to play mahjong, explained once for all three variants
Mahjong is a four-player draw-and-discard game, closer to rummy than to anything else. You draw a tile, you discard a tile, and you win by building a hand of four sets and a pair. Every variant shares that skeleton; the differences are in the tiles you use and the hands that are allowed.
Last reviewed
The tiles
A Chinese set has 144 tiles. Three suits — bamboos (bams), characters (craks) and dots — each run from one to nine, with four copies of every tile. Then four winds (east, south, west, north), three dragons (red, green, white), and eight bonus tiles: four flowers and four seasons.
A Riichi set drops the bonus tiles and plays with 136. An American set adds eight jokers to the Chinese 144 for 166. Everything else below applies to all three unless we say otherwise.
Setting up: shuffle, build the walls, deal
All tiles go face down and are shuffled by hand — the "washing" that gives the game its sound. Each player then builds a wall two tiles high in front of them: 18 stacks for Chinese, 17 for Riichi, and for American the walls are 19 stacks because of the extra tiles. The four walls are pushed together into a square.
The dealer rolls the dice to decide where the wall is broken, and tiles are dealt from that point: each player takes 13 tiles (16 in Taiwanese). The dealer takes a 14th and play begins.
A turn: draw one, discard one
On your turn you draw a tile from the wall and discard one face up into the centre. That is the whole turn. The hand you are building is four sets plus a pair: a set is either a pung (three identical tiles), a chow (three consecutive tiles of one suit) or a kong (four identical tiles).
When another player discards a tile that completes one of your sets, you can call it — "pung", "chow" (from the player to your left only) or "kong" — and take it, laying the completed set face up. Called sets stay exposed for the rest of the hand.
Winning
You win — "mahjong" in Chinese and American, "ron" or "tsumo" in Riichi — when your 14 tiles form four sets and a pair, either from your own draw or from someone’s discard. Scoring is where the variants diverge completely: Chinese Official scores from a list of patterns worth a set number of points, Riichi uses a yaku system where the hand must contain at least one qualifying pattern, and American only allows the specific hands printed on the current year’s card.
What changes in Riichi
- No flowers, so 136 tiles and 17-stack walls.
- Three red fives act as dora — bonus tiles that add to the score.
- You must have at least one yaku (a scoring pattern) to win; four random sets and a pair is not enough.
- Declaring riichi: when one tile from winning with a concealed hand, you can bet a point stick and declare, which locks your hand and increases its value.
What changes in American
- Hands are held on racks, not standing on the table, and tiles are pushed out with pushers.
- The Charleston: before play, players pass unwanted tiles around the table in a set sequence.
- Only hands on the National Mah Jongg League card for the year are valid. The card changes every spring.
- Jokers substitute for any tile in a pung, kong, quint or sextet, but never in a pair or a single.
What to buy to learn on
Learn on the set for the variant you will actually play with people. If your friends play American, buy an American set, because the card and the racks are half the game. If you learned online, it was almost certainly Riichi, and a Riichi set with red fives is the one that will feel familiar. If you have no group yet, a standard Chinese 144-tile set plays the widest range of rules and is the one we would default to.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a game of mahjong take?
A single hand runs five to fifteen minutes. A full Chinese or Riichi game — one round of each wind — is usually sixteen hands and takes two to three hours. American groups usually play for a set time rather than a set number of hands.
Can two or three people play mahjong?
Three-player Riichi (sanma) is an established variant with its own rules and drops most of the character tiles. Two-player mahjong exists but is a different, much faster game. For the standard rules you need four.