Wikipedia Deep Dive

Mahjong

11 min read

Picture a table surrounded by four players, their hands moving rapidly across smooth tiles that click and clatter against each other like birds chattering in a bamboo grove. This sonic quality is no coincidence—the game they're playing was originally named after sparrows, and the comparison feels apt: the sound of tiles being shuffled is remarkably similar to the noise of sparrows squabbling over seed.

Mahjong has been captivating players since its emergence in nineteenth-century China, and today it remains one of the most widely played games across East and Southeast Asia, with devoted followings in Western countries as well. If you've ever played rummy with a deck of cards, you already understand the basic premise: collect matching sets of pieces to form a winning hand. But mahjong takes this concept and elevates it into something far more tactile, strategic, and social.

The Tiles Themselves

A standard mahjong set contains 144 tiles, and understanding what's printed on them is your first step toward understanding the game.

The bulk of the set—108 tiles—consists of suited tiles. Think of these like playing cards: they belong to one of three suits, and within each suit, tiles are numbered from one to nine. There are four identical copies of every suited tile. The three suits are bamboos (sometimes called sticks or bams), dots (also known as wheels, circles, or coins), and characters (sometimes called myriads or cracks).

The bamboo suit has a charming quirk. Instead of showing a single bamboo stalk, the one-of-bamboo tile typically depicts a bird—traditionally a peacock or sparrow, perhaps another nod to the game's avian namesake. The dots suit shows its numbers as circular symbols arranged in patterns. The character suit displays Chinese numerals on top with the character meaning "ten thousand" below, making each tile represent some multiple of ten thousand.

Beyond the suited tiles, you have honors tiles. These come in two varieties: winds and dragons. The four wind tiles represent East, South, West, and North. The three dragon tiles are red, green, and white—the white dragon is often depicted as a blank tile or one with just a frame around its edge, which can confuse newcomers who assume it's a manufacturing defect.

Unlike suited tiles, honors have no numerical sequence. You can't say the green dragon is "higher" than the red dragon. There are four copies of each honors tile, giving you 28 honor tiles total.

Finally, there are the bonus tiles: four flowers and four seasons. These operate differently from everything else. When you draw one, you don't keep it in your hand. Instead, you set it aside, draw a replacement tile, and if you win, those bonus tiles earn you extra points. Each bonus tile corresponds to a seat position around the table, so if you're sitting in the East seat and draw the bonus tile marked "1," you'll score extra points for that fortunate match.

Setting Up the Game

Four players sit around a square table. Each receives a wind designation: East, South, West, North, assigned in counterclockwise order. East serves as the first dealer, and play proceeds counterclockwise—the opposite of most Western card games.

Here's where mahjong becomes something more than a card game played with tiles. All 144 tiles get placed face-down on the table, and everyone participates in shuffling them. This isn't a quick riffle shuffle—tradition demands that all players use both hands to vigorously push the tiles around the table, creating that characteristic clacking sound. It's meant to be loud. It's meant to take time. The ritual serves both a practical purpose (thoroughly randomizing the tiles) and a social one (building anticipation).

After shuffling, each player constructs a wall: a row of tiles stacked two high and eighteen long, positioned in front of them. These four walls get pushed together to form a square in the center of the table. Experienced players position their walls at a slight diagonal, with the ends meeting in a way that creates a smaller central square and leaves more room for their hands.

The dealer then throws three dice. The total determines where to break the wall and begin dealing. There's an elaborate procedure involving counting stacks, drawing tiles in groups of four, and eventually ensuring each player ends up with thirteen tiles. If anyone accidentally flips a tile face-up during dealing, house rules kick in—some groups penalize the clumsy player, others allow the intended recipient to choose whether to keep the revealed tile, and still others shuffle it back into the wall.

The Flow of Play

Each player maintains a hand of exactly thirteen tiles throughout the game. On your turn, you draw a fourteenth tile from the wall, then immediately discard one tile face-up into the center. This maintains your hand at thirteen.

Here's where strategy emerges: you're not just passively drawing and discarding. You're watching what other players discard. You're building toward specific combinations. And sometimes, you can interrupt another player's discard to claim that tile for yourself.

The goal is to assemble a winning hand of fourteen tiles. A standard winning hand contains four melds plus a pair of identical tiles (called the "eyes"). A meld is a specific combination of three or four tiles:

A pung: three identical tiles
A kong: four identical tiles
A chow: three suited tiles of the same suit in numerical sequence (like the four, five, and six of bamboos)

When you draw a tile that completes your winning hand, you declare victory immediately. But there's another path to winning: if someone else discards a tile you need, you can claim it and win on their discard. This possibility creates delicious tension. Every tile you discard might be exactly what your opponent needs to defeat you.

Seizing Discards

This ability to claim other players' discards is central to mahjong's strategy. When someone discards a tile you want, you call it out and take it—but with restrictions.

Anyone can claim a discard to complete a pung or kong, or to win the game. But chows are different: you can only claim a discard for a chow from the player who discards immediately before your turn. This limitation matters enormously because it affects how aggressively you can pursue sequence-based hands.

There's a hierarchy when multiple players want the same discard. A player completing a winning hand takes priority over everyone else. Pungs and kongs take priority over chows. When there's still a tie, the player whose turn would have come next in the normal rotation wins out.

Any meld formed from a seized discard must be revealed—you place those tiles face-up in front of you for everyone to see. This gives your opponents valuable information about what you're building. Melds formed entirely from tiles you drew yourself can stay hidden in your hand, keeping your strategy concealed.

The Kong Complication

Kongs—sets of four identical tiles—introduce interesting complications. A kong counts as a meld just like a pung, but because you're using four tiles instead of three, you need to draw an extra tile to maintain a viable hand.

There are three ways to form a kong:

You can draw all four tiles yourself and declare a concealed kong. You place all four face-down in front of you (often with two tiles flipped to indicate it's a kong rather than something else), then draw a replacement tile from the back of the wall.

You can form an exposed kong by having three matching tiles in your hand when someone discards the fourth. You claim the discard, display all four tiles face-up, and draw your replacement.

The third method is the most dramatic: you can add a tile to an existing exposed pung. Say you previously claimed a discard to form a pung of red dragons, and now you draw the fourth red dragon. You can add it to your exposed pung, converting it to a kong, and draw a replacement tile.

This third method creates a rare and exciting opportunity called "robbing the kong." When someone adds to their pung to form a kong, any player who could use that tile to complete a winning hand can steal it right out of their grasp. It's the only time you can claim a tile that wasn't technically discarded, and it's as satisfying as it sounds.

Winds and Rounds

A complete match of mahjong consists of four rounds, each named after a wind: East, South, West, North. Within each round, at least four hands are played—one with each player serving as dealer (the East position).

Here's a twist: when the dealer wins a hand, or when a hand ends in a draw with no winner, the dealer stays in place for an extra hand. The same player continues dealing, and the same prevailing wind remains in effect. In theory, a hot streak by a player in the dealer position could extend a round indefinitely, though most groups impose a limit of three consecutive hands with unchanged positions.

Wind positions matter for scoring. If your seat wind matches the prevailing wind of the round (for example, you're sitting in East while it's the East round), or if you collect pungs and kongs of your seat wind or the prevailing wind, you'll score extra points.

Hong Kong Rules and Regional Variations

Everything described above follows "Old Hong Kong mahjong," which serves as a sensible baseline because it uses all the standard tiles without adding exotic rules. It's the teaching dialect of mahjong, if you will.

But mahjong has spawned countless regional variations, some drastically different from each other. Japanese riichi mahjong adds a complex betting element and strict rules about declaring when you're one tile away from winning. Taiwanese mahjong has elaborate scoring categories. American mahjong, which developed among Jewish American women in the 1920s and remains popular today, uses a dramatically different scoring system with an annually updated chart of valid winning hands.

Even within a single country, house rules proliferate. Some groups set minimum point thresholds—you can't win unless your hand would score at least three points. Others allow flexible dealing procedures or alternate methods for handling flipped tiles. The tiles themselves may vary: sets from Japan often include red-colored fives that score bonus points, while American sets include joker tiles that can substitute for anything.

The Social Dimension

There's something about mahjong that resists being played quietly. The shuffling ritual demands noise and participation. The clack of tiles against each other creates a natural rhythm to the game. Players traditionally announce their actions—calling out when they claim a discard, when they form a kong, when they win.

In Chinese culture, mahjong occupies a similar social niche to poker in America: it's a game played at family gatherings, among friends, sometimes with modest stakes to keep things interesting. The sound of a mahjong game in progress—the shuffling, the clicking, the exclamations—is a distinctive part of the acoustic landscape of many Chinese communities.

The name itself carries this social quality. "Mahjong" derives from "maaque," which means sparrow. Some say this reflects the chattering sound of the tiles. Others point to an older card game called Madiao from which mahjong may have evolved. In the south of China—Cantonese and Hokkien-speaking regions—the sparrow name persists. In Mandarin and some other dialects, the game is called "majiang," a nasalized variant of the original name. Only in Thai does the name explicitly reference both sparrows and cards: "phai nok krachok" literally translates to "sparrow cards."

What Mahjong Isn't

If you've seen "mahjong" on a computer, you may have encountered something quite different: a single-player matching puzzle where you remove pairs of identical tiles from a layout. This game, properly called mahjong solitaire, has almost nothing in common with actual mahjong except using the same tiles. It emerged as a computer game in the 1980s and spread virally because it's simple to learn and oddly satisfying to play.

Real mahjong is competitive, not solitaire. It's social, not solitary. It requires understanding probability, tracking which tiles have appeared, reading your opponents' discards, and making strategic decisions about which tiles to pursue and which to abandon. The tiles themselves are beautiful, but they're just equipment—like cards or chess pieces—for a game of skill played among people.

Learning Curve

Mahjong intimidates many newcomers because of the unfamiliar tiles and the seemingly complex rules. But if you can play rummy, you can play mahjong. The core concept is identical: draw, discard, collect matching sets. The main differences are the tiles instead of cards, the ability to claim opponents' discards, and the presence of bonus tiles that work differently from everything else.

The winds and rounds system adds a layer of complexity, but you can learn these elements gradually. Your first game can focus simply on assembling melds and declaring a winning hand. Scoring intricacies, optimal play, and regional variations can come later, after the basic rhythm of draw-discard-claim-win becomes intuitive.

Start with Hong Kong rules. Learn what the tiles mean. Understand that you need four melds plus a pair to win. Pay attention to what gets discarded. And listen for the sparrows chattering across the table.