Filipino Mahjong is the sixteen-tile school: the everyday game of the Philippines, faster and more forgiving than its thirteen-tile relatives, with a wild-tile rule you will not meet anywhere else. The engine is still draw one, discard one, but almost every fitting on that engine — the hand size, the honours, the calls, even what counts as a bonus — has its own local shape. This page lays out the standard table version; as everywhere in the Mahjong world, individual houses adjust details, so treat the payment numbers especially as one common convention rather than law.
The tiles: three suits, and everything else is a bonus
Play uses the three suits only — balls, sticks and characters, 1 through 9, four copies each, 108 tiles in the wall. The winds, the dragons and the flower tiles are all grouped together as bonus tiles: draw one and it goes face up beside your rack, immediately replaced with a fresh tile from the wall. None of them can be part of the hand you are building. A player used to the Chinese or American games loses a whole layer of hand-building material here, and gains a much cleaner playing field of pure numbers in exchange.
The sixteen-tile hand
Each player holds sixteen tiles; the dealer takes seventeen and opens the game with the first discard. A winning hand is seventeen tiles arranged as five sets plus a pair — the pair is called the eye, and each set, called a báhay, is either a pung of three identical tiles or a chow of three consecutive tiles in one suit. Five sets instead of four is the structural difference from the thirteen-tile schools, and it is why the game feels busier: there is simply more hand to assemble, and chows do most of the assembling.
Calls: pung from anyone, chow from the left only
A discard can be claimed to complete a pung from any seat, but a chow may be claimed only from the player before you, exactly as in the Chinese game. A kang — four of a kind — outranks a pung claim on the same tile, and both outrank a chow. Kangs come in the open form, claiming a discard onto three held tiles, and the secret form, laid face down from four self-drawn tiles; extending your own exposed pung with the fourth tile drawn from the wall has its own name, sagása. Every kang earns an immediate small payment from each opponent and a replacement draw.
The wild tile: a new joker every hand
Before each hand, one suited tile is turned up at random and its rank and suit define the joker for that hand: all four copies of that tile are wild and may stand for anything inside your concealed hand. Two limits keep the rule honest. The wild tiles cannot be used to call a discard — melds claimed from the table must be natural — and which tile is wild changes every single hand, so there is no permanent joker to hoard. Watching how many copies of the wild tile are already visible is a core reading skill of the game.
Winning and the payment ladder
The standard win, tódas, is the full five sets and the eye, paid by all three opponents; winning on a self-drawn tile, búnot, doubles the payment. Above the ordinary win sit the named hands: siete pares, seven pairs plus one báhay; escalera, a full 1-through-9 run in a single suit; and bisaklat, the dealer’s hand complete on the opening deal, the table’s jackpot. Smaller bonuses reward a fully concealed hand, an all-pung hand and a very fast win. The exact tariff varies from table to table — what stays constant is the ladder’s shape, with búnot doubling everything on it. Where this school sits beside the Chinese, Japanese and American games is mapped in the survey of Mahjong types; the closest relative of its five-set structure is described in the Chinese rules walkthrough, and the tiles themselves are the standard set covered in the suits and honours guide.
Frequently asked questions
How many tiles do you hold in Filipino Mahjong?
Sixteen, with the dealer taking seventeen and discarding first. A winning hand is seventeen tiles: five sets, each a pung or a chow, plus a pair called the eye.
Are winds and dragons used in Filipino Mahjong?
Not as playing tiles. Winds, dragons and flowers are all bonus tiles: drawn ones are set aside face up and replaced from the wall, and they never form part of the hand.
How does the joker work in Filipino Mahjong?
One suited tile is designated at random before each hand, and all four of its copies play as wild tiles in concealed hands. They cannot be used to claim discards, and the designation changes every hand.
What is bisaklat in Filipino Mahjong?
The dealer’s jackpot: a hand that is already complete on the opening seventeen-tile deal. It sits at the top of the payment ladder, above the seven-pairs and single-suit-run hands.
