A full set holds 144 tiles but only 42 distinct faces, and once you can name those 42 the game stops being a picture-matching exercise. This is a reading guide rather than a picture book: each face is described in words, including the detail that separates it from the face people confuse it with, so it works on a phone screen where the tiles are eight pixels wide and no illustration would help.
The set breaks into four groups. Three numbered suits of thirty-six tiles each account for 108 of them. Then come the honours: sixteen winds and twelve dragons, no numbers on any of them. The last eight are flowers and seasons, which behave differently from everything else. Definitions for the words used below sit in the glossary.
Circles: count the discs
Also called dots. Each tile carries between one and nine discs, and counting them is the whole of the skill. The one of circles is a single large disc, usually the most decorated tile in the suit, which is exactly why it gets mistaken for something special. Middle numbers arrange in rows: six is two rows of three, nine is three rows of three.
The pair that catches people out is eight against nine at small sizes. Nine is a tidy three by three block; eight is two rows of three with a pair sitting apart from them. Count rows rather than discs and the two separate instantly.
Bamboo: sticks, apart from the bird
Eight of the nine faces show bundles of green sticks in arrangements that grow busier as the number rises. Two is a simple pair, three forms a triangle, and by seven and eight the sticks are packed into shapes you learn as silhouettes rather than count.
The one of bamboo is the famous exception: it is drawn as a bird, usually a sparrow or a peacock, and there is not a stick on it. It looks like a flower tile, it is often coloured like a flower tile, and it matches only another one of bamboo. Any beginner who has spent five minutes hunting for the bird’s partner has met this tile.
Characters: one sign changes, one never does
The third suit, called craks or wan, carries two Chinese characters stacked vertically. The lower one is 萬 on every single tile of the suit and never changes, so it is not information — it just tells you which suit you are holding. In many sets it is printed in red while the upper sign is black. The site’s own example of it is Celtic Mahjong.
The upper sign is the number, and there are only nine of them to learn: 一 二 三 四 五 六 七 八 九. The first three are one, two and three horizontal strokes, which is a free gift. Four through nine have to be memorised, and the pairs worth drilling are four against six and seven against nine, since at tile size those are the ones that blur.
Winds and dragons: the faces with no numbers
Four faces, four copies each: 東 east, 南 south, 西 west, 北 north. Rather than learning them as characters, learn them as densities. East and south are the crowded ones, packed with strokes edge to edge. West and north are open, with clear white space through the middle. That one distinction sorts the sixteen wind tiles into two halves in a fraction of a second, and telling the two members of each half apart is much easier than sorting all four at once.
North is the pair that people describe as two figures standing back to back, which is a fair way to remember it. West sits inside a squared-off frame with two legs beneath it.
The dragons are the other twelve honours: three faces, four copies each. The red dragon is 中, a rectangle with a vertical stroke driven straight through it, printed in red and unmistakable. The green dragon is 發, printed green and the most complicated character in the set, which is what makes it look like a character-suit tile to anyone reading quickly — check the colour first, then the fact that no 萬 sits beneath it.
The white dragon is the odd one. Depending on the set it is either completely blank or carries a plain rectangular frame in blue or black. Blank white dragons cause trouble on screen because they read as an empty slot or a face-down tile, and players skip over them while hunting for a pair that has been visible all along. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Mahjong Big.
Flowers and seasons: the eight that break the rule
Eight pictorial tiles, four flowers and four seasons, each carrying a small number from one to four in a corner and usually more colour than anything else in the set. The flowers are plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo; the seasons are simply the four of them.
The rule they break matters on a layout: any flower pairs with any flower and any season pairs with any season, so these eight tiles do not need an exact twin. That makes them the loosest tiles on the board, and it is worth spending them early rather than saving them, because they are the only pairs the layout is willing to improvise with. At a table they play differently again, being bonus tiles that you reveal and replace with a fresh draw.
What gets confused, and what helps
- One of bamboo and a flower tile — both are pictorial and colourful. The bird matches only the bird.
- Green dragon and a character tile — both are dense scripts. The dragon is green and has nothing underneath it.
- White dragon and an empty space — a blank tile still occupies its slot and still needs a partner.
- East and south — the two crowded winds. Compare them against each other, never against west or north.
- Eight and nine of circles — count rows, not discs.
- Three of circles and three of bamboo — the same diagonal arrangement in different colours and shapes. Colour is the faster tell.
Screens make most of that list easier than a physical set does. Most tilesets used online print a small Latin numeral and a suit mark in the corner of each face, which removes the reading problem completely for numbered tiles and leaves only the honours to learn. Several also tint whole suits. If your eyes are doing more work than they should, opening the board full screen is usually a bigger improvement than switching tileset, since the honours are distinguished by fine strokes that simply need pixels. Mahjongg Candy puts that layout on a playable board.
The recognition transfers in one direction better than the other. Clearing a few hundred layouts teaches you every face in the set, which is why players who arrive at a real table from a solitaire habit can already read the tiles and only have to learn what to do with them — which is the business of the three claiming calls. Going the other way, a table player already knows the faces and meets a different problem entirely: stacked layers, buried copies and the geometry of three-dimensional boards. Mahjong Tower is one of the layouts kept on this site.
