A pung is three identical tiles, a kong is four, and a chow is three consecutive numbers in one suit. All three are sets you may finish by taking a tile another player has just thrown away instead of waiting to draw it yourself, and the rules about who may take what, and when, are where beginners lose tiles that were rightfully theirs.
These calls belong to the four-player game only. If you came here from a stacked layout where you lift matching pairs, none of it applies to that board; the words that do apply there sit under free tile and deadlock in the glossary. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Microsoft Mahjong.
Pung: three of a kind, claimed from anyone
Three tiles with the same face — three green dragons, three fives of bamboo. You hold two, somebody throws the third, and you take it. The discard may come from any of the other three players, which is what separates a pung from a chow.
Timing is where it goes wrong. The call has to be out of your mouth before the next player lifts a tile from the wall; once that tile is in their hand the discard is dead and you have missed your chance. When the claim stands, play jumps straight to you and everybody sitting between the discarder and your seat loses that turn. You lay the three tiles face up in front of you, discard one of your own, and the game carries on from there. Japanese rules use the word pon for the same call.
Kong: four of a kind, and the tile you draw back
A kong is all four copies of one face, and there are three ways to arrive at one. You can claim a discard while holding the other three, which gives an exposed kong. You can draw the fourth yourself while all four sit concealed in your hand, which you declare while keeping the set turned so nobody can read it fully. Or you can add a freshly drawn fourth tile to a pung you exposed earlier, which is the promoted kong, and in rule sets that allow robbing the kong a player waiting on exactly that tile may snatch it and win. Marine Mahjong puts that layout on a playable board.
Whichever route you took, a kong occupies four tiles in a set that the hand counts as one, so you would come up short at the finish. That is why you take a replacement tile from the end of the dead wall before discarding. In Japanese rules a declared kong also flips a new dora indicator, which raises the value of everyone’s hand at the table, not only yours — a reason to think before declaring one while an opponent has already announced riichi.
Chow: a run, and only from the player on your left
Three consecutive numbers inside a single suit: two, three and four of characters, or seven, eight and nine of circles. Honours carry no numbers, so there is no run of winds and no run of dragons, and the sequence does not wrap around, which rules out nine, one, two.
The restriction is the whole point of the call. You may complete a chow only on the discard of the player to your left, the one who plays immediately before you. From anybody else at the table you have to draw the tile yourself. American play removes the call altogether: hands there are defined by a printed card reissued each year, and any run you need is spelled out on that card rather than claimed across the table.
Priority, and what a claim costs you
Claims are ranked, and the ranking is worth memorising because it comes up in almost every session. A call that finishes a hand beats everything. A pung or a kong beats a chow. A chow, sitting at the bottom, only ever succeeds when nobody else wanted the tile.
Two players finishing on the same discard is the one case where rule sets genuinely disagree: some pay only the player who sits nearest the discarder in turn order, others pay both. Settle that question before the first hand rather than during the argument it will otherwise cause. Mahjong Relax is one of the layouts kept on this site.
Winning the tile is not always winning the exchange, because every exposed set is a message. Three bamboo tiles sitting face up tell the table what suit you are collecting and roughly how far along you are, and a careful opponent will simply stop feeding you. Beyond the information, there is the score: a hand assembled without claiming anything is worth more in nearly every system, and in Japanese rules a single chow ends any possibility of declaring riichi, since that declaration requires a fully concealed hand.
There is a third cost that beginners feel only after a few sessions. A claimed set is frozen. Those tiles cannot be rearranged later when the hand you meant to build turns out to be unreachable and the sensible move is to switch to another shape. Claim early and often and you will finish more small hands; claim rarely and you will finish fewer, larger ones.
Quick reference
| Call | Tiles | Claim from | Afterwards |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pung | Three identical | Any player | Expose the set, then discard |
| Kong | Four identical | Any player, or your own draw | Draw a replacement from the dead wall, then discard |
| Chow | Three in sequence, one suit | The player to your left only | Expose the run, then discard |
Why a layout has none of this
Take the same 144 tiles, stack them into a turtle, and every rule above evaporates. There is nobody to claim from, three of a kind is never lifted at once, and a run of four, five and six is just three unrelated tiles that happen to sit near each other. What replaces the calls is geometry: which tiles are free, what a removal uncovers, and whether the fourth copy of a face is buried under the third. A table player meeting a solitaire layout for the first time usually reaches for a run out of habit and gets nothing. The site’s own example of it is Coffee Mahjong.
The tiles themselves are common ground, which is the useful part. Learn the faces once and they serve you in both games — the symbol cheat sheet covers the ones that trip people up, starting with the bird on the one of bamboo and the blank white dragon.
