The four-player game is learned in one sitting and argued about for years, because there is no single Chinese rulebook. What follows is the Hong Kong old style sequence, which is the version most commonly taught outside Asia, with the points where the official competition rules and ordinary house rules diverge marked as they come up. Play with the sequence below and you will be understood at most tables; settle the scoring before the first hand and you will avoid the only real quarrel.
Setting up: seats, winds and the wall
Four players take the seats named East, South, West and North, which run anticlockwise round the table rather than by the compass. East deals and carries a scoring advantage, and the seat rotates as hands are completed.
All 144 tiles go face down and are mixed thoroughly. Each player builds a wall in front of their seat: eighteen stacks, two tiles high, pushed together into a square. East throws the dice, and the total decides which wall is broken and how far along the break falls. Tiles are then drawn from that point clockwise around the square. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is The Mah-Jongg Key.
Each player takes thirteen tiles, with East taking a fourteenth so that the first turn is a discard rather than a draw. If a flower or season tile lands in a hand it is laid face up immediately and replaced with a tile from the far end of the wall; it does not count towards the pattern but it does count towards the score in most Chinese schools. Mahjong Deluxe puts that layout on a playable board.
The turn: draw one, discard one
Play moves anticlockwise. On your turn you draw a tile from the wall, then discard one face up into the middle. Your hand is thirteen tiles at rest and fourteen for the moment you are deciding, and that discard is public: anyone may take it if they can use it, and the moment it is covered by the next discard it is dead.
A hand you are building is four sets and one pair. The sets available are three of a kind, four of a kind, and three consecutive tiles in one suit. Winds and dragons have no sequence, so they can only be collected in threes and fours.
Claiming a discard: pung, kong and chow
A pung is three of a kind, and any player may claim a discard to complete one, regardless of whose turn is next. A kong is four of a kind, claimed the same way, and it entitles you to an extra tile drawn from the back of the wall, since a kong uses four tiles where the hand structure expects three.
A chow, three consecutive tiles in one suit, is the restricted claim. In Hong Kong old style you may claim a discard for a chow only from the player immediately upstream of you, the one whose turn precedes yours. That restriction is near universal in Chinese schools, and abandoning it is one of the more common house-rule inventions.
When two players want the same discard, the order is fixed: a declaration of a completed hand beats a pung or kong, and a pung or kong beats a chow. A claim made out of turn skips the players in between, and play resumes from the claimer. Mahjong Impossible is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Everything you claim goes face up in front of you and stays there. That is the real cost of claiming: your opponents can read a third of your hand, and in most scoring systems an exposed hand is worth less than a concealed one.
Declaring the win and counting it
Announce the win the instant the fourteenth tile completes four sets and a pair, whether it came from the wall or from a discard. Winning on your own draw is worth more than winning on someone else’s tile in most schools, and in some the loser who threw the tile pays the whole amount alone rather than the table splitting it.
Here is where the schools genuinely part. Hong Kong old style scores in faan: each qualifying pattern is worth a number of faan, the total doubles the base value, and most tables set a minimum, commonly three faan, below which a hand may not be declared at all. Chinese Official rules replace that with a list of dozens of named patterns carrying fixed point values that add together, with a minimum of eight points required. The same fourteen tiles can be a solid win under one system and an illegal declaration under the other, which is why the scoring conversation belongs before the deal. The site’s own example of it is Number Mahjong.
If the wall is exhausted with nobody declaring, the hand is a draw. Some tables carry the dealership over, some rotate it, and some carry a pot of stakes into the next hand.
Where houses differ, and what to agree first
Ask four questions before you sit down. What is the minimum for declaring a hand. Are flowers and seasons in the set and do they score. Does the discarder pay alone or does the table share. What happens to the dealership on a draw.
Beyond those, the common local additions are a bonus for winning on the last tile of the wall, for winning on a replacement tile after a kong, and for a hand made entirely of one suit. None of these is wrong; all of them need saying out loud, because a player who learned the game from a different set of relatives will assume the opposite.
The Japanese and American branches took these foundations somewhere else entirely. Riichi adds bonus tiles and a locked declaration, while the American game replaces the whole pattern system with an annual card. The map of Mahjong types shows how all of them relate, and if you came here from a browser board, the catalogue index is the solo side of the family.
