American Mahjong is the branch where the rulebook is a piece of card the size of a bookmark, reprinted every year. The legal hands are printed on it, only those hands may be declared, and last year’s card is dead paper for competitive purposes. A player who learned the Chinese game will recognise the tiles and almost nothing else about the way a hand is put together.
The card is the rulebook
The dominant card is published annually by the National Mah Jongg League, founded in 1937, and it arrives in spring. It lists the hands for that year in sections, each hand written as a string of groups with colour coding to show which suits may be used and a marking to say whether the hand must stay concealed or may be exposed.
You choose a target hand from the card and build towards it. There is no general pattern of four sets and a pair to fall back on: if your fourteen tiles do not match a printed line, they are not a winning hand. Runs of consecutive tiles, the chow of Chinese play, do not appear at all, so the building blocks are pairs, groups of three, four and sometimes five identical tiles, along with single tiles specified by the card.
Other organisations publish their own cards, and there is a separate long-standing military variant with a rulebook of its own. Two American tables in the same town can therefore be playing hands that do not overlap, which is why the first question at an unfamiliar table is which card is in use.
The set: 152 tiles and eight jokers
An American set holds the standard 144 plus eight jokers, and the jokers are what change the texture of play more than anything else. A joker may stand in for any tile inside a group of three or more. It may not be used in a pair, and it may not be used for a single tile called for by the card.
Jokers can also be retrieved. If a joker sits in an exposure on the table and you hold the genuine tile it is standing for, you may swap your tile for it on your turn and take the joker into your own hand. That makes exposures a liability as well as a declaration of intent, and it gives late-game play a scavenging quality that the Chinese branch does not have.
Hands are fourteen tiles rather than thirteen. Flowers are in the set and are used as ordinary components of certain printed hands rather than as bonus tiles set aside for points.
The Charleston
Before play begins, tiles are passed around the table in a fixed ritual. The first Charleston is three passes of three tiles each: to the right, then across, then to the left. A second Charleston, in the opposite order, is optional and requires agreement from the table. After it, a courtesy pass across the table of up to three tiles is usually allowed, with the two players agreeing how many.
Two constraints matter. Jokers are never passed. And on the third pass of each Charleston you may pass on tiles you have just received, blind, without looking at them, which is the standard way to shed a suit you have abandoned.
The purpose is to let thirteen unrelated tiles become a plausible attempt at a printed hand before the first discard. It also leaks information: what a player sheds early narrows what they can be building, and experienced players read the passes closely. Mahjong Titans is one of the layouts kept on this site.
The hand itself
Play moves to the right. On your turn you draw and discard, and every discard is named aloud as it is thrown, which is a habit worth adopting because the table plays on the call as much as on the tile.
Any player may claim a discard to complete a group of three or more for a hand on the card, regardless of seating, and the claim is made before the next player draws. The claimed group is exposed on the rack and cannot be changed afterwards, so committing to a hand early is a real risk when the card offers several routes. A layout of that kind in the catalogue here is Mahjongg Alchemy.
Declaring a win means announcing it and laying the hand out to be checked against the printed line. If the wall runs out with nobody declaring, the hand is a wall game and nobody scores. Declaring a hand that turns out not to match the card carries a penalty at most tables, which is a strong argument for reading the line twice.
Payment follows the value printed beside the hand on the card, which removes the pattern arithmetic that occupies the other schools entirely: there is nothing to compute, only a number to read. What varies is who pays. At most tables the player who threw the winning tile pays double while the other two pay the printed amount, and a self-drawn win is paid by everyone at the higher rate. Those multipliers are a table convention rather than a printed rule, so they belong in the same conversation as the choice of card. The site’s own example of it is Mahjong Solitaire.
Where it sits beside the other schools
Strip it down and the differences are these: fourteen tiles instead of thirteen plus one, no runs, jokers, an annual card in place of open-ended patterns, and a passing ritual before play. What survives from the older game is the tile set, the draw-and-discard turn, and the habit of claiming discards. Mahjong Deluxe Plus puts that layout on a playable board.
The historical route by which the game reached American living rooms belongs to another part of this site. For the rules alongside their relatives, the Chinese sequence shows what the card replaced, the Japanese school shows a different answer to the same problem of restricting hands, and the map of Mahjong types places all three against the single-player boards in the catalogue index.
