How to Play Mahjong: A Beginner's Guide

Mahjong looks intimidating from the outside — a wall of 144 tiles, four players, and a scoring system that seems to have a rule for everything. It isn’t. At its heart the game is simple: draw a tile, discard a tile, and be the first to build a complete hand. Everything else is detail you pick up as you go. Here is the shortest path to actually playing.

This guide covers the classic four-player tile game. If you just want to get a feel for the tiles first, the solitaire game here teaches you every face without any of the scoring.

The tiles

A standard set has 144 tiles. Most of them fall into three suits, each running 1 to 9, with four copies of every tile:

• Circles (also called dots or coins) — 1 through 9.
• Bamboo (the sticks) — 1 through 9.
• Characters(the “10,000” suit) — 1 through 9.

On top of the suits come the honor tiles: four winds (East, South, West, North) and three dragons (red, green, white). Many sets also include eight bonus flower and season tiles, which score you a small extra but never form part of the hand itself.

The goal

You win by completing a hand of four sets and a pair— fourteen tiles in total. A “set” is either three of a kind (a pung), four of a kind (a kong), or a run of three consecutive tiles in one suit (a chow). The pair is simply two identical tiles. Get there before anyone else and the hand is yours.

A turn, start to finish

1. Build the wall. Every tile is shuffled face-down and stacked into a square wall, two tiles high, in front of the players.
2. Deal. Each player takes 13 tiles. The dealer (East) starts.
3. Draw. On your turn you draw one tile from the wall, giving you 14.
4. Discard.You keep the tile that helps your hand and discard one you don’t need, face-up, back to 13.
5. Claim (sometimes). When a player discards, any opponent can claim it if it completes a set for them — then they show the set, discard, and play jumps to their right.

Play continues around the table until someone completes four sets and a pair and declares mahjong. If the wall runs out first, the hand is a draw.

Playing with three

Short a fourth? The game adapts cleanly — see our guide to playing mahjong with three players. And once you know the melds, a little strategy goes a long way.